


Fire and Light

by adulter_clavis



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fantasy AU, I guess I should mention this is gonna be a long one, I really took this AU thing and ran with it, Kid might be an insane necromancer, Multi, Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Other, Violence, if I think of anything else witty or pertinent I'll put that here, not Aurelius, the slowest of slow builds
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-01-14 13:32:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 36,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1268236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adulter_clavis/pseuds/adulter_clavis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She woke to the protests of her entire body at whatever excuse for a bed she was sleeping on, to the burn of a deep wound across the nape of her neck and down her spine, to an aching feeling of something lost that was frankly more alarming than anything having to do with not knowing where she was or how she'd gotten there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I'm waking up to ash and dust

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I take ideas way, way, way too far. I do like this story, though, and the more people talk to me about it the more likely I'll be to keep writing it (and by extension Aurelius). It might be wise to set aside canonical assumptions about alliances/friendships.

 

 

Soul woke to a boot in his ribs and an annoyed, "Get up."

It was a few hours before dawn, to judge by his tower room's narrow window.

"You're to go with the Fourth," said the man who'd kicked him, and Soul squinted up at him through the light of the mage-lantern on his belt, made out red hair that was nonetheless not as brilliant and damningly carmine as his own eyes, and grumbled an irate, inchoate query that earned him the kind of scowl that meant he was coming close to getting kicked again.

" _Why_ is none of your business," the man said, and Soul dragged himself into a sitting position, scrubbing his hands over his face and back through his hair in a futile effort to get the ghost-pale tufts out of his immediate field of vision. "All you need to know is that the battle-mages think themselves clever and have mounted a covert attack on the city. You're going to intercept and kill them before they can reach the fortress, which seems to be their goal. Get into your armor and report to the Fourth at Temple Square."

"Unless you're going to help me with my armor, go the fuck away, Spirit," Soul growled, wobbling a bit when he stood and stumbled the few steps it took to get to the opposite end of his room where his armor sat.

Green eyes narrowed. "I could have you flogged for insubordination," the older man said, earning an irate snort from Soul, caught halfway through pulling on his undershirt.

"You could have me flogged for no reason at all, don't trouble yourself with finding one," Soul said, fumbling with uncooperative leather. "Don't you have someplace better to be?"

Spirit did, and left with one last warning that Soul had better get his sorry carcass to Temple Square without delay.

Soul had gotten dressed, abandoned all hope of breakfast, and realized only after he got into his armor that he had to pee - was in fact halfway to the damn temple - when a few things clicked into place in his head and he came to a stuttering stop in the city's dark streets, boots scuffing across wet cobble. Primarily what stopped him was his brain reminding him that the battle-mages, in centuries of war, had never once drawn this close to Death City, not even with all the magic that Medusa and the other witches could bring to their aid. That was with good reason: Shinigami's presence there was too strong, and his son too powerful, for their enemies to have ever even located the sprawling fortress-city, let alone mounted any kind of attack on it. Even Asura, blood traitor that he was, could not show Arachne and Medusa the city of his birth; he would never be able to see or return to it again, so long as his father and brother wished him in exile.

That they apparently _had_ made it into the city and not the abandoned necropolis that it masqueraded as meant that someone, somewhere, had leaked some very critical information and quite possibly an artifact or two.

Soul broke into an uneasy jog, dread creeping into his stomach. He wasn't keen on joining up with the Fourth, but at least with them he'd have numbers going for him. Getting caught alone by battle-mages was _not_ how he wanted to die, even if things seemed too peaceful for the moment. It _was_ awfully quiet, though, considering the fact that the bulk of the soldiers had to have been mobilized nearly an hour before Spirit had bothered to wake Soul up. All Soul could hear as he drew near the temple was the slap of his booted feet and the rain that had begun right around the time he left the fortress, and his steps slowed the closer he got because the quiet was rapidly changing from reassuring to very, very alarming.

On the one hand, Soul didn't have time to deal with an unfounded attack of nerves; on the other, ignoring instinctive reactions got people killed. He stopped again and slipped into an alley, pressed his back to a wall and took a long, slow breath. His sense of the earth beneath his feet was as solid as it had ever been, and through it he could feel the dim buzz of the other Weapons in Temple Square, wet and tired but not in danger, not alarmed. He'd lived too long in a hostile environment to be jumping at shadows, so once his heart had slowed to something approaching normal he stepped out of the alleyway and moved forward again, the Temple spire looming above -

He was still too far away for the explosion to knock him off his feet, but he felt the rumble and practically went blind at the flash of fire, had to shake his head to dispel a rush of panic. Before he could make a conscious decision he'd shifted his fingertips to claws and leapt, clambering up the nearest wall in a rush that had nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with instinct. The rooftops would be safer, no one looked up for threats, and he sprinted across wet shingles, leaping gaps with a disregard for things like traction and where he might land that probably would have earned him a dressing-down had anyone cared about whether or not he broke his fool neck.

There were no more explosions after that but there was _fire_ and the flash of lightning, and a sickening flare of battle-mage power that made his stomach do outraged loops. He shook the feeling off as best he could, stumbling a little on a landing and nearly twisting an ankle, and didn't shift his hands back, because he was running into a fight and fingers like blades came in handy. When he at last reached the square he came to a skidding halt on the edge of a roof overlooking it, one wrist pressed to his mouth in revulsion at the scene below.

Soul had been raised on horror stories about the enemy, how their magic was a perversion of the natural order, how the witches wanted to consume and destroy the magic that made up the very foundation of the world. How Medusa and Arachne had betrayed them, had corrupted Shinigami's eldest son, would do anything to secure all three of the power focuses on Ragnarock's prison because they didn't understand what would happen should they weaken it too far.

More than anything, though, he heard stories of Medusa's battle-mages, whose magic his people were not resistant to as they were the witches'. He had grown up with stories of the Reaper, who destroyed whole legions with fire, a woman who seldom executed an attack that did not kill. Now that he was older he listened to his so-called brothers mutter about the Reaper's daughter, whom they called Scourge, a woman who threw fire and lightning and searing light at her opponents and whose every move seemed to result in catastrophe. Certainly he'd seen the ranks of his fellows dwindle, and Kid had always exhorted them to display especial courage and focus when it came to effecting her death.

He'd honestly believed they were exaggerating. Not in a way deserving of his ridicule but in the way soldiers did, building an already legitimate enemy into a legend.

He'd been wrong.

The only reason the square was illuminated was because there was fire everywhere, creeping along the awnings of shops towards the buildings and consuming the corpses strewn across the cobblestones with sullen determination that defied the weather. Steady rain had also done little to diminish the fact that the entire square seemed painted in blood, and Soul swallowed bile. There was only a moment to notice details, though: there was a battle still raging on the blood-slick temple steps, a dozen or more of his kin throwing themselves against a single slight figure with a fervor Soul could only label _desperation_.

Well, the Scourge was in the city; if there was ever a time for desperation, this was it. Soul slipped off the roof, one eye towards the fight, and got down to the ground via a series of windowsills with only minimal scrambling despite the distinct tremor that had begun in his hands. So long as he was undetected he had the advantage, or at least a chance of survival, and maybe he didn't like Shinigami and maybe his kin had treated him like an unwanted, possibly rabid dog his whole life, but he didn't want it to end like this. As soon as his feet hit the ground he ducked underneath the closest stall, hoping that the fire consuming its awning wouldn't force him out of hiding before he came up with some sort of plan.

He _wanted_ to wait until she was done, try and ambush her from hiding as she moved through the city, but that was, he knew, more of a result of the fact that he was fucking _terrified_ than because it was a valid plan. Going after her when she wasn't distracted was asking for it, because she'd be certain to realize he was there before he could get a hit in, and as soon as her attention focused on him he was a dead man.

Soul had come up with no less suicidal option than rushing headfirst into the fray when she leapt out of the crowd of enemies mobbing her in a perfect, high arc, landing in the lower tier of the square's pond-sized fountain. Her attackers took the movement as retreat and surged forward in an angry rush of limbs shifted into razor-sharp blades, prompting her turn and climb up the fountain spire, where she waited, crouched low, watching them from a height of some ten feet.

It was all the opportunity he was going to get, since calling blades out of the stone at her feet might skewer the others and would give him away besides. Soul dashed forward as the other Weapons formed a wary circle and waded into the fountain, fumbling earth magic into armor that might thwart enough of her attacks to keep him from dying on the spot should she target him. He was halfway to the middle of the fountain when he saw her smile.

The hair on his arms stood up and he remembered - fire and _lightning_ , and he was standing in a _fucking fountain_ -

He gave up on earth-armor and fucking _grounded_ himself in time to avoid the full force of the attack, though the shock still locked his jaw and limbs for a stunning, incredibly painful heartbeat. The others did not fare as well, but Soul couldn't waste time dwelling on that. Instead he forced uncooperative limbs to move while the Scourge stood in a lithe movement and indulged in a derisive snort, strained upwards and buried fumbling, blade-tipped fingers in the meat of her calf. She shrieked and stumbled, and Soul had to snap all of his effort from staying grounded enough to resist lightning back into maintaining some semblance of armor because her response was _fire._

His response was scythe-blades erupting from the stone of the fountain, which shocked her into jumping away - or trying, anyway. Her leg was too injured to function and Soul still had ahold of it, so the attempt was cut ingloriously short by Soul's shoulder refusing to come fully out of its socket. She twisted as she fell, and Soul had another instant where he was certain his heart had stopped when glass-green eyes met his, promising death, and he didn't even know _how_ to defend against the light that began to collect in her open palm -

Her head hit the side of the fountain with a sickening crack and the light winked out of existence, leaving Soul with a hammering heart, a shoulder he thought might never work again, and the distinct feeling that he'd somehow cheated death. For something like a full minute he didn't move, just stayed half-sprawled in the fountain heedless of the fact that its water was slowly being replaced by blood, and tried to remember how to breathe, tried to comprehend the reality of what he'd just done, tried not to be sick from stress and pain.

What ultimately snapped him out of his stupor was not the fact that he _knew_ he didn't have much time to deal with the woman whose leg his fingers were still embedded in, nor the all-eclipsing pain in his shoulder; it was the coalescing of the souls of the dead, faint silver light fighting against the fire's sullen gleam on the water.

Soul watched them gather, confused by the sudden violence of their deaths, guttering flames strengthening into a steady glow as they drifted up and away, heading towards the fortress in the encroaching dawn. The Weapon-souls he sighed over; the battle-mage souls made him swallow hard as they fought the pull of Shinigami and Kid's magic - but he'd been taught often and painfully over the course of his life that only Shinigami, his son, and a select few elite warriors, Spirit among them, were allowed to consume the souls of their vanquished enemies. It'd never made sense to Soul that a practice that made Weapons so much stronger should be forbidden to the vast majority of them, but he'd always supposed it had something to do with control.

Still, no use wasting time gawking. He set aside his twisting stomach and managed to get his legs under him properly without aggravating his wounds too much, then grabbed the Scourge's leg with his good arm - the left, _why_ did he have to go putting his dominant arm in the line of fire - and dragged her still-unconscious body close enough so that he could attempt to free his arm. It took longer than he wanted to manage it, but a cursory shove against his shoulder and then his elbow afterwards didn't result in the vision-whitening snap of a joint popping back into place, so Soul was inclined to count that a victory. At least his legs seemed uninjured, stable enough after a few minutes of blank staring that he didn't fall when he climbed out of the fountain, hauling his enemy's body along with his one functional arm and doing his best not to give her another head injury in the process.

If she was going to insist on not dying - and if the initial hit to her head hadn't done it, he had no illusions that time would finish the job, not given the way her kind supposedly recovered from wounds - then he was going to insist on getting _something_ out of this suicide mission. Slitting her throat would only mean that no one would believe him when he claimed to have fought and killed the Scourge. Better to capture her alive, be seen carrying her into the fortress and down to the dungeons, and if he wanted to manage that he was going to have to move quickly lest she wake up and finish him off.

With that thought in mind, Soul draped her across the fountain wall, arms still dangling in the water, and hooked the blades of his left hand into the - ridiculously tough, what did Medusa _make_ it out of - leather of her armor right at the nape of her neck. It took more effort than he liked and a foot braced against the low wall but he managed to claw his way through, opening up her armor in a line that followed her spine from neck to hips. He was out of breath at the end, and would have been sweating if it wasn't pouring fucking buckets, but there no point pondering how out of shape he'd become after a few months cooling his heels in Death City while Kid tried to decide if he could be bent to his will or not. He caught her padded jacket with gentler claws and tore at that, too, at last exposing the tattoo, seething with nauseating witch-magic, that curled over the nape of her neck and down part of her spine.

It was a pretty thing, for all that the magic that imbued it made his stomach roil, bold calligraphic lines that gave physical form to a bit of impressively complicated magic. Soul stared at it for a moment, committing the firelit lines to memory, then pressed his claws to the skin just above it with a frown as he collected his own magic in his fingertips. He'd been taught that this required attention to form, that he should etch Shinigami's sigil into the skin of his enemies, but he'd seen it done once before and no such technique had been employed. He was dooming her to a slow death by cutting her off from the magic that kept her alive; Soul saw no need to add insult to grave injury by branding her with her enemy's mark, and so he flexed his fingers till blood welled around the blades and dragged them across and through the mark and its magic until his skin crawled with it.

He knew when the link broke, as much because the clammy feeling left his skin as because some vital _something_ seemed to leave the woman in front of him, a held breath let go, some strange draining of vigor from her complexion despite the fact that the light was questionable at best. Not surprising, he guessed, though perhaps a touch disturbing, though that might have been the fact that he'd just shortened her lifespan to a few weeks at the outside. Such was war, though, and she'd gotten better treatment at his hands than she'd probably have gotten from anyone else. The others would have slit her throat and to hell with any potential glory involved in bringing her in alive; the Scourge was simply too dangerous to let live. Perhaps that made him foolish.

It wasn't worth worrying about, so Soul washed his hands as best he could in the clouding water of the fountain and nearly wept at the pain involved in negotiating the woman's slight form up and over his shoulders so he could carry her back. She was a tiny thing, this supposed legend, hardly up to his collarbones and anything but threatening once she'd been robbed of the ability to kill him with one negligent strike of her magic. That didn't confer much of a sense of security, though, and Soul allowed himself only one grim look back at the carnage in the square before he began his plodding return to the fortress.

 

* * *

 

By the time Soul reached the fortress gates and had to deal with the guards, he was well past thinking that getting incredulous stares as he dragged the Scourge down to the dungeons would be an enjoyable experience; more than anything he just wanted to forget that the whole cursed morning had happened and go back to bed. The guards stared, disbelieving, and tried to stop him, and Soul was just tired, tired and covered in blood and his shoulder felt like it would never work again, so he didn't really bother trying to play nice.

"Get the fuck back," he growled when they tried to bar his way, tried to tell him that he'd have to wait while they fetched someone higher up the chain of command, and he wondered, distantly, if perhaps he'd inhaled more smoke than he thought for his voice to have become so hoarse.

They shied away enough for him to push past, and maybe it was the fact that he'd bared all of his pointed teeth when he spoke and maybe it was the blood dripping all down his shoulders from his unconscious cargo, but they didn't try anything when he did.

It didn't stop them from running to tell on him, though, and Soul was about halfway to the dungeons when someone dared step in front of him again.

This time it wasn't a guard, though, and Soul stopped, scowling as viciously as his battered state would allow.

"Brother," Wes said, and Soul hated, _hated_ , the way his brother's eyes had changed color to a dark, dried-blood shade when he submitted to Shinigami, "what have you done? What happened?"

"Spirit sent me to the Fourth," Soul growled, baring his teeth again just because his brother's were so glaringly no longer pointed. "I almost made it to Temple Square before the Scourge set it on fire. She killed everyone there, lured the survivors of the explosion into the fountain and hit them with lightning. I tripped her up and she hit her head and here we are, and if you don't mind I'd like to get her into a cell so I can get my shoulder seen to, because it feels like it's been torn apart."

Wes stared at him in silence just long enough for Soul to really want to punch him, then said, "What are you playing at, brother? What are you trying to accomplish with this?"

"What the fuck are you _on_ about?" Soul growled, the fingers of his right hand flexing in impotent anger. "I knocked her out, it seemed a waste to just kill her when I could bring her in alive. I've broken her link to the witch, why would I have left her there? She destroyed too many of us for me to feel like killing her would be even trade. Let Kid execute her, I don't care; but make sure they know who brought her in, who fought her to a standstill. I want everyone to know that it was me who defeated the greatest warrior the enemy has ever had, Wes, so don't you go telling Kid anything but the truth."

"You think you can win their trust without doing what I did," Wes said, and his tone was not unkind, his eyes almost sympathetic. "For this, I can't say you won't. But Kid will still know, and Shinigami, and Spirit and Azusa and the other Death Scythes."

"I don't care what they think," Soul said, shifting under the Scourge's weight and wishing more than anything for a bath. "I just want to be treated like I have a right to exist. Why the hell would you think I care what Kid thinks of me? You were brought up with the same beliefs I was, brother; Mother would weep if she saw you now, bowing to the death god. Let me by, before the Scourge wakes up. If you want to help, send someone down to the dungeons with some fresh bedding and food for the both of us, since I'm sure no one's on guard duty down there."

"I hope this ends the way you want it to," Wes said, and stepped aside, eyes unfathomable as Soul pushed past him, glaring.

 

* * *

 

Though he'd initially thought to deposit his prize in a cell and be on his way to the medic, Soul decided halfway there that he would probably be better served taking the Scourge with him, if only because it was really a job for someone with two functioning arms to divest the woman of her weapons and armor and make sure she didn't have any life-threatening wounds. Not that the medic _liked_ it, especially once he realized what Soul wanted him to do and who he was tending to, but Soul's glare was enough to cow him. It was probably the blood, though he supposed it might have been the fact that he dragged the man out of bed without even the slightest consideration for the hour.

Still, he got a sling for his shoulder, dry clothes, and assurances that he would heal if he could manage to rest his arm, underlaid heavily with the implication that his freakish lineage was the only reason it had any chance of healing properly or quickly. That was fine; Soul was used to it. He _did_ heal fast, one of the few advantages he had, and he was more than willing to take what bonuses he could from being descended from a man commonly regarded as contagiously insane.

The Scourge was another matter, one that the doctor wasn't pleased with having to deal with, but she was unconscious and obviously no longer a danger and so he consented with only moderate complaint, rolling his eyes at the mess Soul had made of her armor in favor of actually undoing the buckles and laces and pulling her out of it the same way she must have gone in. He left her in her undershirt and soft breeches, pronounced her unharmed aside from the head trauma, her mangled calf, and the wound Soul had inflicted to remove her from her magic, and told Soul quite bluntly to remove himself and his prize from his infirmary before he called someone to do it for him. Soul rolled his eyes near to give himself a headache, got the woman situated across his shoulders again with some help from the doctor, and resumed his trek downwards.

It was a long walk, too, considering that his people had worshipped a death god and been at war for a lot longer than living memory could recall. Beneath the fortress and the city was a real necropolis, set up as much to house the honored dead as to serve the death god and his necromancer children. Soul trekked through halls of bone, door arches capped with skulls, walls gilded in intricate patterns of femurs, recited in his head the names of the bones as he identified them: radius, ulna, tibia, fibula, clavicle, scapula, all arrayed in dizzying designs and harboring a silent magic that lay heavy on his skin like the hush of snow, waiting to be disturbed.

Down and down he went, reciting bones in his head, mandible, maxilla, patella, sacrum, increasingly jittery over time after almost dying and skin-crawlingly aware of the burden he carried. He tried to convince himself that he just wanted to resume his interrupted sleep, but what he really wanted to do was _collapse_ , have a little breakdown about the entirety of his morning and then sleep because at least if he was asleep he wouldn't have to think about it.

His feet kept moving, though, and he finally reached the door to the prison to find that the only word in his head was _cranium,_ because there were skulls leering at him from the door arch as he fumbled the lock while trying not to drop his awkward cargo. Eventually he wrestled the door open and stumbled through, grumbling at the shriek of old hinges and then blinking in surprise when he found himself standing in a warm pool of light. Wes _had_ sent someone ahead of him, it seemed, if the place was lit up; normally the dungeon stayed dark and vacant, as his people were not in the habit of taking prisoners.

There was food on the rough guards' table and small magical lights along the wall, fresh straw-stuffed mattresses in two of the cells, and all Soul could think was that _he could have told whoever brought this stuff to stay_. Wes had helped, but only just enough; Soul still had to manage with one good arm and no one to assist, no one to guard the enemy's most dangerous soldier but him, and certainly no reward. No surprise, that. He was just glad that his brother had thought to have food left, because he'd never gotten breakfast and his belly was more than willing to remind him of that fact.

Food would have to wait just a little longer, though. Soul shuffled over to the cell furthest from the door and somehow managed to deposit his burden onto the mattress without hurting either of them, though it was a near thing with the strange contortions required to succeed at the maneuver. Once she was arranged on the cot in a reasonably comfortable position he returned to the guard area, securing manacles and leg shackles once he'd made sure the key hung beside them actually worked.

He bound the woman who had once been one of the greatest threats his people had ever faced, and once it was done he stared down at her for a few minutes, scowling at her incongruous appearance, wishing she looked like the monster she was. So deadly and so - delicate, almost, despite the blood on her and the fact that he'd seen her take down a whole group of his people in one grotesque sweep. She was a pretty thing, really, small and finely built, hair in wild disarray where it wasn't matted with blood, and the moment Soul realized he thought she was attractive when she wasn't posing an active threat to his continued existence he removed himself from the cell with all possible haste, the door shutting behind him with the heavy clatter of a setting lock.

He decided not to dwell on that traitorous sentiment and focused instead on eating the bread and cheese that had been left on the table, which had the added bonus of getting him away from the woman who'd nearly killed him multiple times in the space of five minutes. Eating with his left hand was annoying and Soul would have given a lot to have avoided entirely the circumstances that led to his right arm being bound in place against his chest, but things had turned out rather well, considering. That Spirit or whoever had given Spirit his orders had likely intended Soul to go out and get himself killed was a fact that wasn't lost on him, but he'd gotten used to that over the years. They'd been trying to kill him since he was old enough to fight, sending him half-trained against the strongest battle-mages Medusa had to throw at them in the hope that he'd take out a few key players in the process of dying, that perhaps his bad blood would win them an important victory in the process of being snuffed out.

Not yet, and not today. They'd sent him to die and he'd brought back their greatest enemy, save the witch; perhaps Kid would let him be now, send him back to the front lines where he wasn't being watched all the time, where he could at least die doing something genuinely useful instead of cooling his heels while Shinigami's son tried to convince him that becoming a lich would cure him of his inevitable madness. He had no doubt that it would, if only because sacrificing all free will tended to negate the effects of madness on one's behavior, at least. That it would have left him trapped inside his own head as he spiraled into insanity seemed unimportant to everyone but him, which made sense, he guessed. After all, _they_ wouldn't suffer for it.

Soul finished the food and settled back into the rickety chair with a sigh, kneading his tender shoulder with a wince. It would be a while mending, even given that he healed faster than most, and that kind of injury would make every moment of the recovery unpleasant. It hurt in a way that made him wonder again just where Spirit had gone, what had been more important than the fact that the Scourge was in their city. They might want him dead, but that wasn't worth letting the likes of _her_ run around. Where had Spirit been, where was Marie?

He decided that sleeping was a better use of his time than wondering why nothing made sense, and heaved himself out of the chair to curl up on the cot in the cell next to his prisoner's.


	2. The ghost in you, she don't fade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Doin' the thing  
> Feel free to let me know if this requires additional, actually serious, tags.

She woke to the protests of her entire body at whatever excuse for a bed she was sleeping on, to the burn of a deep wound across the nape of her neck and down her spine, to an aching feeling of something lost that was frankly more alarming than anything having to do with not knowing where she was or how she'd gotten there. There was a heaviness to her wrists and ankles, a rough chill that bespoke chains, and when she opened her eyes there was nothing above her but dark stone blocks illuminated by the steady sullen glow of a poorly-made mage-light. A dungeon, then, and the pulsing ache in her skull made her think that there was a reason why she couldn't remember how she'd gotten there or, for that matter, how she'd been hurt, exactly. The memory was there, but fuzzy, too indistinct to do much more than taunt, and when she made to sit up the screaming pain in her leg became much more important than retrieving memories that probably wouldn't help her remedy her current circumstances.

She had not become what she was without perseverance, though, and she sat up despite agony and dizzy confusion and nausea, worked her ankle a bit, flexed her leg, determined that she likely had some excessively deep puncture wounds that had somehow missed the tendon. Her armor was gone, but that wasn't a surprise; the neat bandages round her temple and wound up her calf under the soft pants she'd been dressed in were, though. Also unusual was that she appeared to have been thrown into a cell without guards, she who was the strongest of her kind, she who decimated enemy armies all by herself. The leg wound was unimportant, because she could force her body to go on in spite of it thanks to the same power that made her strong enough to bend the bars of her prison with naught but her bare hands. Still, though - how had she ended up in the Weapons' dungeons? Rolling her shoulders to gauge the wound on her back, she tried to remember.

Stein had shown up of a sudden, she recalled that much, interrupting the plans she'd been making with Black Star, Kilik, and Ox for the upcoming battle against the Weapon army and the Thompson sisters. He'd taken her away because Medusa had sent him with a special mission, had somehow gained the knowledge and specific charms needed to breach the Weapons' great stronghold, and they'd traveled on vector arrows to a location that she couldn't have found again on pain of death. She remembered that, remembered scaling the walls in the night and finding not a ruined necropolis but a sleeping fortress-city, and then -

Fire, and blackness. Stein had told her to make for the great central temple while he drew attention away from her, and - well. That had been foolish of her, trusting him. Perhaps Medusa was right when she mused that her battle-mages might be better off not knowing their bloodlines, since even the concept of a mother and a father engendered a certain level of implicit affinity. Not that that had been the real reason she'd trusted him this time, though; that had been the talisman he'd carried, imbued with a not-inconsequential amount of Medusa's magic intended to transport them to their destination via vector arrows.

She'd been betrayed, then, and if she couldn't remember how she'd ended up imprisoned instead of dead then she wouldn't dwell on it. After a minute of staring at the wall across from her she shrugged, mouth pulling into a thin line of pain and anger, and forced herself to her feet, chains clattering. The racket didn't summon a guard, though, and her frown deepened. Were they so unconcerned, then?

She was halfway to the bars of her cell when a lanky, red-haired man strode into view, accompanied by the sharp-edged sound of Weapon magic - scythe blades, in his case, that flowed from floor and ceiling and walls behind him to form an impenetrable, tightly-woven barrier.

"Death Scythe," she said, chin lifting as she came to a jolting halt, teeth clenched against the agony in her calf and trying to ignore the fact that she was bound hand and foot in the presence of one of her enemy's strongest.

"Maka," he said, and her name coming from that mouth, delivered with equal parts constrained awe and grief, stopped any thoughts she'd been entertaining about wrenching the bars apart and doing her best to electrocute him.

Instead she began formulating a plan that involved setting bits of him on fire until he told her how he knew her name and why he said it the way he did, and her fingers were twitching a bit with the urge to call flame when he gave her a bitter smile and shook his head.

"Don't try," he said, green eyes rueful, cautious, strangely pained as he settled himself on the rough bench that faced her cell, setting aside the bucket he'd been carrying. She realized as he moved that he was speaking in her tongue and doing it well, without much trace of the barbarous accent she would have expected. Somehow it made her distrust him even more, if that were possible. "Medusa made it harder when she started binding you all to her with spell-inked tattoos, but we can still cut you off from her magic, and you've got nothing to draw on now except your own strength. Don't try, Maka; it will only kill you faster."

"You're lying," she snapped, because she knew of no _link_ ; her power was her own, "and I am not concerned with hastening my demise. Surely you and your demented heathen high priest will be sacrificing me soon enough. What did Stein promise you in return for his safety?"

"You," the man said, so much grim hurt in his expression and voice that Maka drew up short, some of her indignant anger evaporating into confusion. "You, and the lives of all those who entered the city with you. I hadn't expected to hear that you were alive and in the dungeons - the original agreement was that he would place you in a position to be killed, and that was enough. With you gone, Kid believed that the Thompsons could take Black Star and Kilik, perhaps with some help from Azusa. As to your power, try if you must. There is precious little you can do, now; you're barely more than human, albeit with an impressive amount of combat training."

Sid was dead, then, after spending most of Maka's lifetime teaching her to fight. She swallowed hard and reached for her power, for fire and lightning and blinding light, intending to take what revenge she could for her brethren - if the man was her only guard, as it seemed, she could kill him and smash her way free, set everything aflame and run -

Pain screamed from the wound on the back of her neck down her spine, arced through every nerve until her stomach rebelled, and she was only dimly aware of how badly it hurt when her knees hit the floor because she was too busy dry heaving.

That would explain the hollow ache in her chest.

Maka was still trying to make her stomach stop heaving when the bucket that her supposed guard had been carrying hit the ground in front of her, and when she rolled her eyes up to give him a feral glare he only gave her a stern scowl in response.

"Don't try it," he said, and something about his tone, about the way he moved as if constantly on the verge of whiplash violence, made her stay still. She told herself it was because she was wounded and weak and sick.

The bucket was full of cold clear water, and Death Scythe dropped a rough cloth on the lip of the bucket on his way out. Cramping stomach or no, the inside of her mouth tasted like bile and old blood, and she barely managed to refrain from dunking her head into the water with no regard for keeping it clean or maintaining appearances. Seemliness, she reminded herself. Even in chains, even imprisoned and wounded and dying by inches, she had a reputation to maintain. She dipped her head to the water and took great gulps, filling what emptiness she could with water before she took the cloth and scrubbed what she could reach of her face and hands, skirting around the bandages on her temple, trying to ignore the dizzy throbbing in her skull and leg.

"Let me tell you a story," the man said, settled on the bench again.

"As if I could stop you," she said, smoothing the cold cloth over the back of her neck with a sigh of relief before bending to drink again.

"If you didn't want to listen, I wouldn't bother you," he said, green eyes shuttered when she looked up at him again, and she rolled one shoulder, noncommital.

"I doubt you came down here just to bring me water, Death Scythe," she said, eyeing the barrier he'd created. "And I must admit to a certain amount of curiosity as to why you would come, if it were not to abuse me in some way, or perhaps haul me away to serve as sacrifice to your dark god. I'd also like to know how it is you came to speak my language so well. Most of your kind can't manage it at all, and those who do are barely intelligible at best." She settled back, stretching her injured leg along the floor with a wince. "Feel free, so long as it isn't bragging about how many of my siblings you've killed."

"I'm not interested in spending more time fixating on this endless war than I already do," he said, something familiar in the discontented slant of his mouth. "And don't call me Death Scythe. That is what I am, not my name. My name is Spirit."

Maka nodded, scrubbed at her fingers with the cloth for lack of anything better to do and because her nails were filthy, and gave a sort of abortive half-shrug. "All right."

"So," Spirit said, leaning forward a bit, elbows propped on his knees, "I'm sure you know some of this story. Before you were born your mother was sent on a mission with some of the other best and brightest of her kind. They were to find a path through the mountains and into the forest below that was both usable and unguarded."

"She found it," Maka said, more than familiar with tales of her legendary mother's exploits. "And she and Stein created the magical gate that we use to get from Medusa's tower to the front. We both know this story. Here's something I bet you didn't know: it's an ongoing rumor that I was conceived on that mission, and Medusa let my mother keep me because she and Stein were prodigies."

Spirit stared at her for a very long minute then, looking rather bemused underneath his blank surprise. "No, I hadn't heard that one," he said, the corner of his mouth twitching up. "Perhaps you know, then, that she was gone for quite a long time on that mission. That was because her team found the pass, but that winter was particularly bad. Suzume was the only one who lived, and it was a near thing. She crawled out of the mountains half-dead and stumbled over a little village, and decided to stay near it until she was strong enough to move on. That was where I found her, and now we reach the part of this story that I _haven't told anyone,_ because I'm no more keen on being executed than you are. Don't think to try and use it against me, either - they'd never believe such a story from the Scourge."

"I'm not _stupid_ ," Maka snapped, picking a bit at the bandages on her temple and wondering if it would be worth undoing them to clean the wound. "Tell me whatever incriminating information you must. We both know that it won't do me any good."

Spirit gave her another odd smile, satisfaction and arrogance in strange mixture. "I was young then, and they'd sent me to the village to look into reports that supplies were going missing. I wasn't doing much good in that capacity, but I'd also been hunting down a feral behemoth that had been causing trouble. I found her when I found it, because her magic had driven it mad and it had finally found her. She killed it with a single strike of lightning," he added, an almost dreamy smile flitting across his face.

"She passed out right after, weak as she was, and I was too surprised and stupid to do anything but take her to the nearest healer, who happened to be a witch. That was for the best, though. The witch altered her link to Medusa so that it would let through enough power to keep her alive, but not enough for her to do much of anything. It wasn't until she woke up days later that I realized I'd accidentally captured the Reaper."

"You had her at your mercy and didn't kill her when you figured out who she was? _Why_ do they call you one of their champions?" Was all Maka could respond with, imagining herself in a similar situation and unable to think of a course of action that didn't involve immediate execution of a notorious enemy.

"She wasn't a threat any more," Spirit said, and the way he looked at her - with something like _pity,_ fuck him, she needed no pity from a _Weapon_ \- made her want to punch him all over again. "Why would I kill a woman who could barely manage to get out of bed on her own when I knew she'd never pose a threat again?"

"She was the _enemy_ ," Maka spat, willing herself to relax when she tensed enough to make her leg hurt. "Did you miss the fact that she'd been killing your people since she was old enough to learn to fight? I never would have thought that one of my enemy's greatest warriors would be so sentimental. Perhaps I was wrong to think that meeting you on the battlefield would be a grim day."

He gave her a rather unkind smirk. "My weak sentimental side is the reason you exist," he said, sitting back and giving her an arch look. "I sent back a rather vague report and stayed with Suzume, and it was a long time indeed before Medusa sent anyone to look for her. By then we had _you_ , and I imagine you can figure out how _that_ happened."

There was an incredulous pause in which Maka wondered if perhaps the man's grasp of her language wasn't as functional as it seemed, but he kept watching her, expression expectant and grave and maybe a little nervous, so Maka swallowed a bit of water and found her voice.

"Stein might have betrayed me, but I know who sired me," she said, shifting from scornful to irritated, wishing that, if it couldn't make this man _go away_ , sheer strength of will could at least be enough to make the pain in her head subside. "Why would I believe such a ludicrous story when I know for a fact that Medusa would have destroyed the kind of abomination you describe? Why would you expect me to believe that my mother would ever have allowed a Weapon to violate her? My bloodline has been documented since its inception, Death Scythe, and Medusa's records are inviolate. Who are you to tell me otherwise?"

"Your _father_ ," Spirit said in a furious growl entirely unlike his previous tone, and Maka sat back a bit, swallowed hard, and remembered with painful clarity that she was in chains and in a cell and completely without her magic. "Where do you think I learned your bizarre language? Suzume and I were going to change everything. We were going to overthrow everything in this world that had wronged us because it's not just Medusa who spews poison to her people. Then Stein came, and we didn't have much choice because that man is a two-faced _monster_. He took Suzume and he took you, and somehow he convinced Medusa to let both of you live. I'll thank him for that, but one good deed, even if it was saving the best thing I ever managed to do in this life, is not enough to overshadow everything else he's done. I'm sure you don't see any reason to believe me, and I'm not going to sit here and argue about it. I've told you the truth."

"The best thing?" she scoffed, almost laughing. "If you believe what you've told me, you sired a veritable monster so far as your war is concerned. You gave the enemy its strongest weapon. What kind of strange, indecisive traitor are you? Fall in love with your enemy and continue to kill her kin? Has it pained you all these years, knowing you might face me in battle? Were you too weak to start your revolution without someone else giving you the courage? You could _never_ be my father, no matter _how_ good a warrior you are. I'd have been culled in childhood if I'd inherited that kind of weakness."

He stood in a violent rush, scowling, hurt, and dug in his coat pocket, withdrawing something that glimmered in the low light.

"Your mother told me to give you this if ever we met," he said, fingers tangling in what looked like a fine chain. "Believe me or don't, label me weak if it helps you avoid examining your beliefs, but I'll tell you one thing. Stein betrayed you to get away from Medusa, because she was making him experiment with that power source beneath her ill-gotten tower. She doesn't know what she's meddling with. It was driving him mad and he did the only thing he could think of to save himself. If she continues to manipulate it, she may yet kill us all."

Maka snorted and regretted it, because it made her head throb. "I'm sure that your kind attaches some great ritual significance to it, but it's nothing but a natural, if rare, concentration of magic. Don't worry about it, and don't think that Stein is anything more than a common traitor. I wouldn't advise you place any trust in him."

"His continued existence depends on his cooperation," Spirit said, green eyes boring into hers. "I would suggest you consider the same, daughter. There is some slim chance that you could come out of this alive, but Kid wants to find out if he can sacrifice you and bring you back as a lich the way he did the Thompsons, and, barring that, execute you. Even if we left you here you'd die within a few weeks from lack of power. I would suggest you start acting cooperative."

"Fuck off, _Papa,_ " Maka snarled, and his face hardened into sharp anger that made him look almost threatening enough to be the man her siblings called Death Scythe.

The scythe blades blocking off her cell disappeared as he turned, and just before he strode away he threw the bit of metal he'd been holding into her cell, where it crumpled into a glittering heap against the side of the bucket. "Die here, then," he said, back to her and fair vibrating with tension. "I hadn't expected to see you alive again, anyway, so I suppose I should be glad to have had that much, at least."

He strode away, shoulders tight, and after a minute Maka reached around the bucket and collected the bit of chain, realizing as she did that it was a finely-wrought collar, still holding on to the shreds of magic that had been forged into it. She went very quiet and very still when she recognized the insignia worked into the metal, and didn't move for some time after.


	3. Quite a shame that it goes this way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this took a while, and I'm sorry about that. I wrote this in 500 word chunks over the course of a month or something, and I'm quite surprised that it was mostly coherent all the way through. My brain likes to refuse to let me write when there are details I need to figure out, even if I'm not AWARE of them, which is part of why it took so long. The rest is laziness.
> 
> Thanks as ever goes to the poor saps I rope into proofreading for me, including but not limited to Marsh, VictoriaPyrrhi, ProMa, and Livi.
> 
> Next chapter is gonna be FUN.

It was not the noise Spirit made as he strode past the cell Soul was sleeping in that woke him; rather, it was the feel of the man's power when the wall of scythe blades appeared that jolted him out of sleep, skin prickling and confused as he bit back curses at the pain in his shoulder. Why he felt the need to stay quiet, Soul couldn't have explained, but he did - and those feelings weren't usually wrong. So he stretched out along the hard cot as best he could, shuffled the threadbare blanket a bit so he could roll over without exposing his back to the chill air of the dungeon, and pressed his good hand to the rough stone of the wall. If Spirit was constructing temporary barriers, something _had_ to be going on, and there had been more than one time in his life where being in possession of blackmail-worthy information had saved Soul a great deal of abuse. He didn't really _like_ having to resort to blackmail and petty threats to defend himself, but needs must from time to time.

It took only the tiniest twist of power to manipulate the stone digging into his palm into letting him hear the conversation in the other cell, so little that he doubted Spirit would have noticed it even if he'd been paying attention, which he wasn't; he was too busy having some kind of emotional conversation with the Scourge _in her own language_. That was interesting. Soul was aware of no reason why a Weapon should be apparently fluent in that twisting, lyric tongue - the occasional battle-mage who turned traitor was expected to learn the language of his benefactors as a matter of course - but here they were anyway.

The sound of the woman retching rudely interrupted any musings regarding Spirit's motivations, and Soul swallowed hard against sympathetic nausea. She must have tried to set the Death Scythe alight and found out the hard way that her borrowed power was no longer there for her to command, a stunt that had probably taken a full day off her remaining lifespan. Soul heard the cell door open, heard something hit the floor and didn't need to understand the words to know that when Spirit spoke a moment later he was issuing a warning. There was no sound of a struggle after that, or, indeed, any sound at all other than dry-heaving and the slosh of water that meant Spirit had probably brought her a drink. That was, Soul supposed, unexpectedly kind of him - but in light of whatever was going on, not particularly shocking.

They traded words, briefly - and shadow take him but that woman could make her mild, pleasant voice sound truly bloodcurdling - before Spirit began to speak at length. Soul, still exhausted, surprised himself by dozing off, startling back to full awareness some time later thanks to a combination of words spoken in tones of barbed loathing and the sound of something metal clattering across the floor. He didn't dare move, though, because hard on the heels of that the scythe-blades retracted into the wall and Spirit left, power buzzing around him. If the Death Scythe found out that Soul had been awake for his strange conversation, there was no telling what he'd do. The man was unpredictable and ruthless, and Soul had no desire at all to find out what his fate might be if he gave Spirit a reason to think he was a threat.

Unfortunately, holding still so Spirit wouldn't realize he was awake meant staying in one place for a while in case Spirit came back. Soul wasn't interested in getting out from under the blanket if he was going to be trapped in the dungeon until it was safe to be seen leaving; might as well be warm - and he also didn't really care to come face to face with the Scourge in a foul mood, regardless of whether or not she was still capable of incinerating him with a flick of her wrist. Those details considered, he stretched out, undid the little bit of magic he'd worked on the stone - a tiny thing, and an application that Soul wasn't certain any of the other Weapons would have considered a valid use of their power even in the event they realized it was possible - and settled in for a bit of a wait.

Which, of course, turned into him falling asleep again. He woke who knew how much later, groggy and desperately wanting a bath, and of course tried to roll out of bed using his bound arm, which resulted in pain and panic in that order - and then more pain when he tumbled to the floor. Growling profanity under his breath, Soul picked himself up with his good arm this time, settling back on his heels when he got upright to remind himself that his balance wasn't the same with one arm strapped to his chest. That gave him time to realize both that he was hungry _again_ and that his clothes felt bonded to his skin, so he must have slept quite a bit, though of course being underground gave him no indication of it.

It took a minute, but he ventured out, turned, and deliberately strode over to the Scourge's cell as though he owned the place - wouldn't do to show the enemy how out-of-sorts he was, let alone how much she still scared him on pretty much the same level that Kid did - and found her, incongruously, asleep. He pulled a face, slumping back against the wall and indulging in a jaw-cracking yawn before pushing back off the stone and turning towards the exit, which was little more than a bright spot at the end of a very long, very empty hallway that echoed with death-magic. Trudging along, Soul wondered what Medusa told her soldiers about Lord Death's power and snorted under his breath as he concluded that it was probably all ravening zombies and twisted abominations and barbaric sacrifices. Not that that wasn't _part_ of it, boy was it ever, but there was also the sleeping necropolis that whispered in his dreams. That was probably why he'd slept so much; it was quiet in the depths, serene, and the ambient power had a way of lulling anyone who spent an appreciable amount of time around it.

All semblance of inner quiet vanished, however, when he made it at last to the guardroom and found his brother seated at the rough table, pale head bent over a bit of paper.

"Wes," he said after a moment, and got a negligent wave in response.

For approximately thirty seconds Soul stood still, bristling, trying to remember to keep his breathing even and not gouge his palm with his fingernails and above all _not_ to punch his brother, particularly with his bad arm, until at last Wes set down his pen and turned around with a tired, sideways smile.

"I had supper left in your room not long ago," Wes said, throwing an arm over the back of the rough chair as he twisted the rest of the way around to face Soul. "Go ahead and get a good meal in you. I think I can handle one lone battle-mage who's had her wings clipped." His eyes shifted, came to rest on Soul's bandaged arm. "Perhaps have Nygus check on that arm while you're at it."

"It's fine," Soul said, gruff, waiting for Wes to slip up and give away the real reason he was being kind. "I just need to rest it while it heals. What are you doing down here? Surely Kid has better uses for you than - whatever you're doing."

The tired smile turned a bit wry. "And yet here I have been sent," Wes said, spreading his hands wide. "Perhaps Kid felt it was the least he could do for the man who brought the Scourge low. Having her alive is a great boon, you know. If he can raise her - "

"He won't be able to control her," Soul snapped, covering the fear that jolted from his heart to his belly with a scowl. "He'll try to make a lich of her and it _won't work_ , her heart would never let itself be confined and controlled. Tell him, Wes. If he raises her and she turns, her revenant could destroy us all and all this war will have meant _nothing._ "

"Fear doesn't suit you, Soul," Wes said, tilting his head sideways just enough to make Soul snort. "As if I could dissuade Kid of anything. As if any Weapon could best him in a battle of wills. I'll agree, though: I wouldn't expect one such as her to submit voluntarily, even knowing that her death is unavoidable." Wes glanced away, and Soul wondered what would happen if he told his brother about Spirit's visit, wondered if he even wanted to, blackmail material or no.

"Go," Wes said after a moment, eyes still on the wall, face now in careful profile. "Get your supper, brother. Have a bath. I'll still be here when you get back."

"Fine," Soul said, not interested in wasting any more time with his turncoat brother, and left. The walk back up through the ossuaries didn't seem nearly as long as the grueling trip down, but that was to be expected; he was neither exhausted nor carrying a body, after all. As he ascended, the grave-calm of the bone galleries dissipated, though, replaced by the din of the living in much the same way that the underground chill fell from his skin when he reached the main floor of the fortress.

The guards didn't try to stop him this time, content instead to watch him pass in a way that Soul wasn't certain he'd ever encountered - uncertainty and fear he was accustomed to, but not this strange, confused deference. Rumor got around quickly, it seemed. He did his best not to stare back at them as he trudged through the vaulted halls leading to the ossuary, eyes studiously straight ahead by the time he reached the soldiers' quarters that sat between it and the rest of the fortress.

Said quarters also happened to sit beneath the tower he'd lived most of his adult life in, which had begun when he'd turned eleven and been given over to the soldiers for training in how to die while doing as much damage as possible to the enemy. Soul picked up the pace as soon as he got close, and managed to make it to the tower entrance without running into anyone he was obligated to talk to. He let go a tense breath when the heavy door shut behind him, leaning against the rough wood in relief and happier to see his drafty tower than he'd have ever expected. He was away from the Scourge, Spirit hadn't tried to skin him alive for overhearing things he shouldn't, Wes hadn't tried to deliver him to Kid for conversion, and he was out of that damn dungeon. If his shoulder would stop hurting and cramping in protest at both his injury and his body's fast-forward attempts to heal it, life would be approaching tolerable.

Couldn't have everything, he supposed. At least there should be still-warm food waiting for him when he managed to drag himself up the tower stairs, which was more than he could ever remember getting from his brother. With the idea of food - Wes had said supper, so he supposed it was evening - and a bath fixed firmly in his mind, Soul pushed himself away from the door and began the long ascent to his quarters. They'd stuffed Wes at the top of the tower, too, some years before Soul had joined him, but of course that hadn't lasted. Wes was _smarter_ , knew when he was beaten, he'd said. Was tired of being an outcast.

Was _scared_ , Soul knew, and couldn't blame him for that because madness was a constant lurking threat that made his blood run dark garnet red-black on the bad days, days when the thought of tearing everything apart brick by brick elicited smothered, gleeful giggles and sharp smiles that showed too much tooth. Those days he was glad there was a war on, because it gave him an outlet for what might very well have turned into the blindly murderous tendencies everyone seemed so concerned about. As if it was his fault that he'd been born to a cursed bloodline. As if any of them could have even _dreamed_ of keeping it in check as well as he and Wes did.

Soul managed to shake off what was on its way to becoming another bout of sullen anger on the way up the stairs, reminding himself that he was the hero now, that they couldn't write off what he'd done no matter how they tried. Oh, it might have no effect aside from 'redeeming' a bit of his heritage, but he'd take that. He'd take it a thousand times over if it meant they'd treat him like he deserved to be there.

Supper was a covered tray on his desk, and Soul dropped into his rough chair in shock when he lifted the lid and found thick slices of roast beneath, covered in rich gravy, and a variety of vegetables he wasn't sure he'd ever seen in one place before if one excluded the work he'd done in the kitchens as a child, peeling endless potatoes and cutting up ingredients he never got to taste. Shock gave way to hunger quickly, though, and Soul snatched up his utensils - or would have, if his right arm hadn't still been bound tight to his chest. The attempt at motion hurt, but he didn't care; his arm was functional no matter how much it hurt, and he cursed his luck and the Scourge and doctors in general as he dug at the bandages with his left hand. That lasted only a few seconds, however, because his shirt was too much in the way for him to really free his arm - he heaved himself back out of the chair with a growl and grabbed for the hem of the shirt with his good hand, contorting awkwardly as he struggled to get it above his head one-handed. The doctor had helped him put a shirt on over his bandages on purpose, he knew, to keep him from doing _exactly_ what he was trying to do.

Maybe he'd just eat the damn food with one hand and put his stupid sharp teeth to use for once. Not like there was anyone around to sneer at him for eating like an animal and it didn't matter _anyway_ , because he was the _hero_ and they could all _choke_ on it -

The door slammed open just as Soul realized with a little panicky jolt that he was kind of stuck in his shirt, and several things happened in rapid succession:

Spirit barged in with absolutely no regard for anything but his own very obvious panic, which choked his voice into something rather high and fast as he said, "I need to talk to you," but Soul wasn't paying much attention to that, seeing as he was occupied with his own weird claustrophobic state;

Soul, already halfway to solving his predicament in the most excessive way possible, stopped trying to remind himself that it was really a very childish way to react to getting tangled up in a shirt and let his power go, which shredded his shirt courtesy of the scythe-blades that erupted from his skin and also made Spirit shriek a bit in surprise when matching blades clawed their way out of the floor at his feet in an attack that could and _had_ killed several battle-mages at once;

Spirit, his whole life a soldier and _much_ stronger than Soul thanks to the fact that Kid fed him witch-souls, shrugged off the attack without much effort and counterattacked reflexively, darting forward to catch Soul with a roundhouse kick that sent him flying towards the tower's stone wall, no longer rough-hewn blocks but a fucking _cluster_ of vicious blades;

Soul's world went red, and then black.

When his vision cleared and the red faded Soul found himself staring at Spirit's face in extreme closeup, not because the man was trying to retrieve him from the blades he'd been attempting to impale him on but because Soul apparently had him by the throat. He blinked in surprise a bit, swallowed hard imagining the trouble he was in, and eased off with deliberate, slow movements, wincing when he realized how deep his fingers had been buried in the soft flesh of Spirit's neck.

"I apologize, Death Scythe," he said, tension in every muscle, waiting for another attack as he lowered his good hand and edged away, noting as he did that the scythe blades had all disappeared and that, somehow, his scant furniture was still intact. It hadn't been a drawn-out struggle, then; he hadn't lost himself for very long at all. A relief, on multiple levels; if he'd killed Spirit, Soul doubted he would have survived the night, and if he hadn't regained control quickly, well - he still wouldn't have survived the night. Probably.

"Ah," Spirit said, and dissolved into rough coughs for a moment, rubbing at his neck but, for the moment, seemingly not interested in avenging Soul's assault upon his person. Soul kept putting space between them, at least until his legs hit his desk, at which point he set his feet in a stance that would let him fight or flee quickly if it came to it. If he was quick, he could probably soften the stone of the floor a bit, catch Spirit's feet -

"Let's try this again," Spirit said, hoarse. Soul snapped out of his thoughts, tracking the other man's movements as he swallowed and straightened up, clearing his throat to ward off another coughing fit. "I apologize; I shouldn't have come charging in." His green eyes were calculating and a bit wary, looking down at Soul from what was, even now that Soul was grown, a height difference of several inches. "Let's consider this whole incident behind us, shall we?"

"Yes," Soul said, drawing the word out, suspicious. "Let's. What do you want?"

Spirit pushed himself away from the wall, straightening his collar in the most casual way possible, eyes anywhere but on Soul as he took in the narrow room and at length selected Soul's bed as a suitable seat. Soul watched him in silence, still waiting for an attack, and wished desperately that he'd had time to eat his dinner before being forced into strange situations involving one of the most powerful living Weapons.

"I want you to understand the situation that you're in," Spirit said, mouth twisting around the words in a way that meant he wasn't really telling the truth.

"No," Soul said, a bit sharper than he'd intended. "That might be your excuse to come up here and it might even be important, but that isn't what you _want_. You came running up here in some kind of panic, and you wanted to _talk_ to me? What do you want, Death Scythe? What could I of all people possibly be able to do for you?"

"Do you understand the concept of checkmate?" Spirit asked, and that twist to his mouth was gone - he was all grim pragmatism now, and Soul's hands tightened into fists as he parsed the question.

"I hope you aren't here to play chess," he said, wincing a bit when the act of making a fist pulled at his injured shoulder now that it was free of the bandages that had been keeping it immobile.

"I am here to tell you that you have been put into a corner from which there is no escaping unscathed," Spirit said, crossing his arms over his chest, and Soul wished desperately that he had a way to know just what the nature of the man's conversation with the Scourge had been. "Your brother is down in the dungeons. Do you know why? Do you know why he went to the trouble of having you sent a dinner that he himself, as one of Lord Death's trusted servants, might have eaten? Have you even begun to consider the fact that you've damned yourself by making yourself a hero?"

"In _what way_ ," Soul snapped, bristling, already taking hold of the stone behind Spirit so as to mold it into blades, "has my capturing the greatest enemy we've ever faced _damned_ me? Is it so horrible that now they - that _you_ \- will have to at least fake some respect?"

"Tell me," Spirit said, fingers tangling together but eyes riveted on Soul, "what does Kid do for those who render him great services?"

Soul stared at him in silence, and after a minute the color drained from his face.

"Now you see," Spirit said, and gave him a crooked kind of smile that was really too bleak to deserve the title.

It was - it took a moment for Soul to find his voice again, to force words out past the screaming horror that had lodged in his throat because Wes might have been afraid of madness but Soul was heart-stoppingly terrified of losing his heart and free will, of letting the grave swallow up his passion in exchange for safety.

"So," he managed at last, voice jittery and bitter, "did you come here to gloat, then, or was it just to ruin my dinner?"

"I came here to offer you an alternative, of sorts," Spirit said, back to giving him a grim, shuttered stare.

"Of sorts?" Soul asked, tilting his head a bit to one side, eyes narrowing. "What do you even care, Death Scythe? You should be celebrating the fact that Kid has me cornered at long last. What's in this little arrangement for you?"

Spirit stared at him in silence for long enough that Soul started to fidget, fingers itching with the repressed urge to strike. At last the man moved - stood, body a long line of implicit violence, and gestured towards the door, which erupted into a wall of blades, eyes never leaving Soul's.

"Everything I am about to tell you is information that is grounds for execution," he said, hands settling into the pockets of his coat, shoulders a taut line. "Yes, I have a viable way for you to avoid becoming Kid's creature, but if you follow through with this it will likely mean your - exile, I'd think, considering. It may still end in death; I suppose it comes down to what you consider to be a worse fate than what Kid has planned."

"I'm not sure I can think of one," Soul said, eyeing the other man, skeptical despite his rattling heartbeat and sense of dread inevitability. "If you have some kind of alternative, by all means, Death Scythe. I don't understand why you're bothering, but I'm not going to stop you from attempting to save me, that's for damn sure."

"Mark me, this is not because I am _interested_ in saving you," Spirit said, sardonic. "This is an arrangement that is very much in my personal interests, and I have a certain degree of sympathy for your desire not to become a lich. Now. Whatever the battle-mages are, they can't survive without outside help because they aren't capable of tapping into any magical power outside themselves, and alone they don't have enough inborn magic to sustain their bodies' rather outrageous demands. Medusa compensates for this, and if we sever that link, they die. You know this. What no one else knows except for Kid, Lord Death, and a few others is that we Weapons can link with them, share our connection to the earth's magic. Together we are actually more than the sum or our parts, as they say; the battle-mage becomes more powerful than they were before, and the Weapon gains more than a few new abilities."

"If you're about to suggest what I think you are, that's got to be _exactly_ the opposite of everything Kid could ever want involving me _or_ the Scourge," Soul said, expression turning incredulous. "Setting aside how _insane_ you sound, why would I want to even consider it where the Scourge is concerned? Made even _more_ powerful, she'd kill all of us and walk away laughing."

"It's more complicated than that," Spirit said, pulling his hands out of his pockets so he could cross his arms over his chest. "It's not something just anyone can do; you have to have some base compatibility."

"And nothing says compatibility like stabbing someone, I know," Soul said, unable to suppress the smirk that crept across his face.

Spirit - shrugged, kind of, gave a surprisingly uncomfortable roll of one shoulder, and looked away again. "It isn't very far different from how I met her mother," he said.

Full stop. Soul stared at him, mouth gaping wider every minute, until Spirit gave him a glare that could have cracked marble.

"You're a _traitor_ ," Soul stuttered, shocked enough that he sat down on his desk. "I don't even know if there's a _word_ for what you are. You _fathered_ the bane of our people and you want _me_ , the blood-traitor's spawn, to help keep her from being executed. Are you _serious?_ Nothing about this strikes you as _completely ridiculous?_ "

"Would I tell you something like this in jest?" Spirit actually rolled his eyes. "Not that anyone would believe you if you went around telling them. I can assure you that you would hardly be my _first_ choice, but you are most certainly my _only_ choice. Who else could I possibly ask this of without ensuring my execution but you, who no one would believe even if you _did_ try to betray me? Besides, if Kid takes her, you stand to lose the most: they'll execute me, but you will still be a lich, and I think we needn't argue which of those fates is the worse."

"Let me just," Soul said, and stopped, shook his head, pushed back off his desk. "You want me to see if I can form some kind of mystic bond with your - _daughter_ \- because you don't want to find out if Kid can raise her as a lich and learn your secret?"

"I don't want her _dead_ ," Spirit snapped, and Soul caught himself sidestepping because he'd expected the floor to turn to blades. "I want her away from here, because at least Medusa will let her have a warrior's death. You understand? I don't want her to go through whatever Kid has in store, I don't want her _here_ , and since I can't send her away from this _hell_ that has become our lives, I can at least return her to the side in this war that will torment her _least._ "

"So you want me to do this thing, or try it, and if it succeeds we might _all_ die when she blows us all apart - and if it fails she and I are _certainly_ dead and your secret's probably out. Kid _does_ get his victims' memories when he raises them, doesn't he? You're committed now, Death Scythe. If I fail, you're doomed and so is the Scourge. If I succeed, what's to stop her?"

"You can control, to some extent, how much power is shared," Spirit said, still looking at him as if calculating the most efficient way to cut him into the smallest pieces with one attack. "I don't think you can completely cut them off once you're linked, but you can keep them from getting anything but the bare minimum if your will is strong." He gave Soul a very hard stare that held little of confidence and much of grim resignation. "Yours had better be. I suspect it must, considering your bloodline and the fact that you haven't killed any of us yet."

"Is any one of us actually stronger than she is?" He couldn't fathom. She was undefeated, horrifying, a killer of countless Weapons, fury incarnate in the form of a slim woman who wielded fire and lightning with profligate skill.

"You had better be," Spirit said, and that was that. "If you can bind and control her, Kid will let the both of you live, because as a lich she would be much diminished even if he _could_ manage to bend her to his will, and if he kills you once you're linked she will - go mad, perhaps. Probably not die, she's too strong. The results would be unpredictable and messy. If this little venture fails, I'm sure he'll take you both, but I've at least convinced him that she can keep you sane in the event of success. At least you can be _useful_ , no?"

"And if this succeeds?" Soul asked, because he knew - there was no doubt, now - that Spirit wasn't going to settle for merely saving his daughter from the immediate threat of Kid's attentions.

"I'll figure it out," Spirit said, voice an angry growl, decades of resentment and pain etched into his face. It was the first time Soul could remember thinking that the man looked his age, even if there was no grey in the bright red of his hair and no enduring lines on his face. "If it works, she'll be safe for a while, long enough to get both of you out of here."

"Are you suggesting I go with her to _Medusa?_ Is there _any_ aspect of this that actually involves sanity, or am I just a sacrifice with a time delay for the sake of your precious butcher of a daughter?"

Soul was becoming deeply, bone-achingly tired of having Spirit look at him like he was simple. "You would hardly be the first Weapon traitor, assuming she decided to return," he said, voice filled with the casual disdain that seemed to be everyone's default tone for speaking to Soul. "With her to vouch for you, who would object?"

"Why would she _bother_ vouching for me, once she's back with her people? Can't they just," he waved his hands in a vague gesture that could have meant anything, "fix her? Remake her bond to Medusa so she doesn't need me?"

"You think they'd fix her?" Spirit laughed, bitter. "No, I think not. They'd find out about you if she told them, and that would be the end of it. She's more than smart enough to figure _that_ out. You'll be fine. So what do you say, Soul Eater - will it be the Scourge, or will you pledge yourself to undying servitude to Lord Death?"

Bind himself forever to the person who represented everything he'd been taught to hate and fear and destroy, the woman who killed better and stronger Weapons than he without mercy or remorse or seemingly much effort, and very likely ensure that he would never be welcome among his people again - or die, and be reborn a thrall to a death god, passion and free will subsumed, any hope at becoming _better_ , at making everyone realize that he wasn't Ragnarock incarnate, abandoned in favor of admitting weakness, of giving up -

"Let me eat my damn food," he snarled, and saw a tiny light of victory, of hope, flare in Spirit's jade-green eyes. "Let me have _one good meal_ in my _entire life_ , and then fine. I'll try it. But let me have this much at least."

"Of course," Spirit said, and even _bowed_ a little. "I'll be waiting for you at the tower base. Don't rush on my account."

"I fucking won't," Soul said, teeth bared again, and Spirit gave him a rather haughty, distinctly displeased look before he left, scythe-blades retracting as he did.


	4. I never really know a killer from a savior

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright alright alright alright
> 
> So my husband got promoted and we're moving to Portland, Oregon, which is about three thousand miles away, so things have kind of gotten hectic what with having to prep the house for sale and all that, which kind of explains the delay. The rest is because I'm a derp.
> 
> Please direct comments/questions/hate mail to me here or on tumblr, and enjoy!

Soul took his time with his dinner, refusing to hurry just because his brother, Spirit, and probably soon enough Kid himself were waiting on him. If he was about to bind himself to the Scourge to avoid being resurrected as a lich by the son of a death god, he was damn well going to take his _time_ with his food. It was _delicious_ , only slightly ruined by the fact that Wes hadn't had affection in mind when he procured it. Only _slightly_ ruined by the fact that no matter what he did he'd lost to Kid at last.

Thank all the myriad shadows for Spirit and his fool sentimentality, he supposed.

His shoulder still hurt, but not as much as it had before his little outburst, so Soul didn't bother binding it back into place once he was finished with his meal. He did take a few minutes to put on a pair of decent breeches, tug on his less-abused pair of boots, and find a shirt that didn't have too many obvious mends in it. Might as well look decent marching to his fate.

Spirit was less than amused, first at the wait and then at Soul's insistence that he be allowed a bath first. To his credit, the man seemed well aware of Soul's less than enviable position, and managed to swallow his disdain for the younger Weapon long enough to walk him over to the officers' baths with a silent jerk of his head to indicate that Soul should follow him. Not easy, given the length of Spirit's legs, but Soul managed and was well rewarded when Spirit showed him into a private room equipped with a massive tub and what Soul assumed was a full complement of bathroom luxuries, considering that he didn't know what half of the bottles even _were_. Somehow Spirit managed not to laugh at him while he was gawking at what had to be everyday items for the Death Scythe, things like soft towels and soap that wouldn't take off skin along with dirt. Instead he gave Soul a withering look, rolled his eyes, pulled the lever by the tub that would funnel hot water into it, and settled himself into an easy slouch against the doorframe.

"So this bond," Soul said, watching water fill the tub with something like disgruntled wonder. "Is it just - some kind of link that lets us share power?"

"It was for me," Spirit said, watching him as though considering whether killing him might be a better choice after all. "I'd imagine it's dependent on how much control you have and how well you work together. It's not exactly something we've had much opportunity to study, and I'm fairly certain no one has tried to force it before."

"So now I get to be an experiment," Soul muttered, grumbling under his breath at having to undo his buttons all over again. There was hot water, though; it was all going to be worth it.

Spirit gave him an unamused look before turning his eyes deliberately elsewhere as Soul undressed. "Better an experiment than dead, I'd think."

Soul allowed himself a surly grunt in response, then distracted himself with digging through the assorted toiletries for a bar of soap that didn't smell ridiculous before climbing into the tub. That necessitated a few minutes spent wallowing in blissful silence as the heat sank into all his sore muscles, and by the time he'd gotten his hair wet through he'd come up with at least a somewhat coherent way to phrase his next question.

"So you're actually not concerned that your precious daughter might pick up critical information from me and report to Medusa with it?" he asked once he was settled in the almost-scalding water, scrubbing grime and leftover blood off his chest and belly where the Scourge's ravaged leg had rested while he'd carried her.

"No," Spirit snapped from the doorway, and gave him a sidelong look like daggers.

"And you actually think I can _control_ her?" That was the real kicker, he thought; that Spirit could disdain him so and yet believe he could contain and bend the Scourge's will to his wishes.

"You can keep her alive while keeping her from becoming powerful enough to pose a threat," Spirit said, jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth. "Control her? Please. She's of better stock than _that_."

Soul huffed a bit while he scrubbed his face clean. "Which does bring us back around to the matter of her breeding, since we're sharing secrets," he said, turning his attention to the blood under his nails rather than look directly at the Death Scythe. "Who _was_ her mother, and why aren't _you_ the one trying to serve as a power source for her?"

"Not your concern," Spirit said, power crackling in the air but not given physical form, not yet.

Soul was silent for a few minutes while he scrubbed his hair clean, more than motivated to take advantage of quality soaps, and considered a new angle of attack that hopefully _wouldn't_ end with him sliced to pieces. He considered, also, that one of the highest-ranked soldiers his people had might still be intimately tied to one of their most powerful enemies, and wondered just what _that_ might mean.

"You're _also_ not concerned with someone of _my_ breeding having access to whatever additional strength that this kind of bond will give me?"

Spirit's hand rose to his neck seemingly of its own volition, pressing into the forming bruises Soul had left. "Not particularly," he said, mouth in an unhappy line and eyes very cold, everything about him giving the lie to his nonchalant words. "Azusa, Marie, and I should be more than able to contain you if it comes to that."

"You realize that Azusa will kill me," Soul said, skin prickling at the thought of the other Death Scythe, whose ruthlessness was the only thing about her more notorious than her beauty. "Which will, I presume, not have desirable consequences where the Scourge is concerned."

Spirit gave him a flat look. "If it comes to that, I can't say that any outcome could be considered desirable," he said, arms crossed and leaning against the door. "Don't let it come to that."

"No one is as invested in my maintaining sanity as I am," Soul said, washing soap from his hair and reaching for a towel, at which Spirit averted his eyes to the floor.

"Are you _finally_ ready?" he asked after a minute, once Soul had set the cloth aside and begun getting dressed.

"Can one truly be ready for this kind of thing?" Soul asked, fumbling a bit with his buttons when his shoulder refused to let him hold his hand as steady as he wanted.

He didn't look up, but he could _feel_ Spirit's eyes on him again. "If you always waited until you were ready, you'd never do anything worth doing," the older Weapon said, and Soul looked up _then_ , red eyes blinking in surprise. Spirit only gave him another one of those odd, bitter smiles. "Hurry up."

"Ah," Soul said, settling his shirt across his shoulders, voice dropped into the bass rumble he used when he was too distracted to speak clearly, to project, to enunciate. "Yeah. Lead on, Death Scythe."

Spirit nodded, turned, opened the door; paused, and turned his head just enough to give Soul a very green profile stare. "Lead on?"

Soul sighed, squared his shoulders, and raised his chin enough to meet Spirit's eyes. "Escort me to my fate," he said, pressing his tongue against the back of his teeth when he paused. "Accompany me to the breach; my brother certainly won't bother. We're allies now whether you like it or not, because I know your secret and you need me to save the - your daughter."

"You need _me_ in order to avoid Kid enslaving you for the remainder of eternity," Spirit said, eyes narrowing as a fine tension began in his shoulders that bespoke violence.

"I'm not _arguing_ with you," Soul said, and maybe he sounded a bit more desperate than he intended. "I'm just - come _with_ me, Spirit. This is the end for me, you know that. Either Kid gets me or I bind myself to the Scourge and Kid might _still_ get me. If he doesn't, then what? You'll have to excuse me when I say that running away with your daughter is hardly an appealing prospect. I don't want to go down there alone again, especially not with Wes waiting for me."

"As if I'd leave you alone with her," Spirit said, looking away. "Let's go."

Tacit thanks, Soul supposed, for his willingness to at least _try_ , even if it was a dead-end situation and Spirit's claim of having a daughter was - laughable. Soul had to believe that fact, though, insane as it seemed, because Spirit wouldn't claim it if it weren't true unless he'd developed suicidal tendencies; that kind of transgression was severe enough that Kid might investigate it even if Soul were the one tipping him off. Ratting Spirit out wouldn't save him, though, and Soul knew it all too well; as Spirit had pointed out, the more heroic acts he accumulated, the more likely it was that Kid would insist on 'rewarding' him with immortality that amounted to enslavement. It would also conveniently ensure the termination of the last line of direct descendants from the traitor Ragnarock, though there were still more than enough cousins to warrant watching. They didn't carry a history of insanity, though, and Soul assumed that Kid had to be getting impatient with only one lone son left to continue the direct line now that Wes had given himself to Lord Death.

He followed Spirit down into the dungeons without further conversation, hands stuffed deep in his pockets and grinding his teeth together as though hoping that wearing the points off might change his circumstances.

Nothing changed, though. Wes was still sitting there when they finally made their way down through the necropolis, eyes the color of old blood coming to rest on first Spirit and then Soul with a too-knowing weight. He didn't comment, didn't even move as they passed aside from his eyes, which tracked them all the way to the corridor and its line of cell doors.

Spirit stopped of a sudden halfway there, and Soul nearly tripped over himself doing the same, one hand catching the wall's rough stone as he shot the man an incredulous look.

"You go on ahead," Spirit said, arms crossed, doing his best to appear unconcerned. "She isn't interested in talking to me any more, I think. If you're to be linked, you could at least try to manage one normal conversation first." A pause, then, in which Spirit's eyes flicked from Soul to the walls and back again, thoughtful. "It's all I can give you, unfortunately. Would that you could know each other better before entering into this kind of partnership."

"Partnership," Soul repeated, and tried to reconcile the notion with his current situation. "Maybe _you_ have that, Death Scythe, even after all these years. We'll have at best a forced truce based on the truth that the enemy of our enemy can be our friend."

"It'll keep you both alive," Spirit said, "and that's all we can ask for, don't you think?"

The muscles in Soul's jaw might have ached, considering how much time he'd spent making faces that were an unfortunate combination of regret, bitterness, and forced acquiescence, but he was too accustomed to it to notice. He gave Spirit a bleak look and turned on his heel, walked back to the cell where he'd left the man's daughter without the Death Scythe taking a single step after him.

The Scourge watched him approach, green eyes tracking him from her position on the cell's cot, back pressed firmly against the stone wall and mouth in a grim line.

"I remember you," she said when he came close. "The only Weapon I've ever met twice, and the one who put these holes in my leg. Shouldn't you be feasting with your demented high priest, you who brought the Scourge low?"

"If I'd known what my reward would be, I wouldn't have gone near you," Soul said, settling onto the stone bench that faced the cell. "Having Lord Death and his son own me doesn't particularly appeal. I kind of enjoy making my own choices."

"Is that why you've let the Death Scythe bully you into talking to me?" she asked, head tilted to one side in a kind of cruel inquisition. "You don't have the look of a man with the luxury of deciding his own fate."

He watched her for a moment, decided that she was _not_ lovely when she was awake because her eyes were too cold, the line of her mouth too hard, the line of her body too - too much like _Spirit's_ , he realized, taut with that same perpetual almost-violence, even exhausted and dying as she was. In light of their situation, Soul managed - just barely - not to lash out at the contempt in her voice, smothering his prickling anger with some difficulty.

"I," he began, then paused, and took a deep breath. " _We_ ," he started again, "have been given a choice, sort of. I thought I'd try to explain our options, even though it's not really much of a choice so much as a lesser evil."

"If the lesser evil leaves me alive and not enslaved, I'll take it, regardless," she said, slim fingers tangling together a bit in her lap, a kind of odd gesture that Soul supposed came of not having her hands free to do anything else. "You speak as though you and I are in this together, which doesn't make sense," she continued, tone unnaturally calm given that the way she watching him made Soul want to put a blade through her out of self-defense. "Why is that? Who are you, O Weapon lucky enough to catch me off guard? Why are your people not rewarding you?"

He found that all he could do was stare at her for that, confused red eyes clashing against her cool green; he'd never really had to introduce himself to anyone before. He'd always been Soul Eater, bearer of cursed blood, and everyone knew him because everyone knew about Ragnarock, even hundreds of years later. They'd known who he was before _he_ did, really, had had him neatly labeled and filed away before he was old enough to even think of contradicting them. Who _was_ he? What was there to say, really, to the enemy - how to even explain, and he _had_ to explain, because if they were to be linked she _had_ to know, would find out one way or another, he assumed.

The Scourge sighed, through waiting for a response well before he came up with anything to say. "Your name, perhaps?" she asked again, and didn't need to roll her eyes to convey the sentiment. "I'm Maka."

"I'm not certain I believed that Medusa bothered to name all of you," Soul said before he could rethink it, and the look Maka gave him probably could have skinned him alive if she'd been anything other than severely weakened.

"I'm Soul," he said in a rush, happy that there were bars between them and that his voice didn't crack because this woman, this powerless, dying, chained woman, was managing to be just as terrifying as Kid himself and that was - unsettling. "Soul Eater."

"That is not a name," she said, chin rising a bit, interested and imperious. At least some of the lethality had left her stare, forgotten in the face of what Soul supposed was her version of curiosity. "I call Death Scythe what I do because that is what he is to me. My brother took the name Black Star of his own volition. Your kind call me Scourge. These are names that have been chosen or earned. You spit that name out as though it were a brand. I thought your kind ate souls, Weapon."

"Your father does," Soul snapped, pleased to see her flinch just slightly at the word. "Lord Death and his son consume most of them, and let a few of their favorites beg for scraps. Not _me_. I'm just the last living son of an insane heretic who hasn't had the good taste to die yet."

"That man said he was your brother," came the unruffled response, cutting him off before he could get carried away.

"Yes," Soul said, crossing his arms with a scowl, the stone wall biting into his shoulders when he slumped back against it. "I didn't say there were no other sons of Ragnarock, just that I was the last _living_. Are you somehow not aware of how Kid rewards his most loyal servants?"

"I hear many things concerning your death god and his supposed son," Maka said, still so at ease where she was sitting on her cot that it was starting to feel insulting, undercurrent of implied violence or no. "Telling tales of our abominable enemy is a hobby I leave to my lesser brethren. I stick to facts and experience, and I haven't yet encountered one of your kind that stood a chance against me in a fair fight. That doesn't exactly give me reason to believe that your high priest can raise the dead as omnipotent thralls or whatever it is you call them."

Arrogant, and here he'd been concerned about giving her some warning as to the situation they were being thrown into. "Haven't you fought the Thompson sisters?"

That got a snort, and a flash of dismissive green eyes. "They are not my kind," she said, shoulders shifting in an abortive attempt to wave one hand. "I've heard the tales, but they are not kin to me, nor to you. I know _that_ much."

"They _were_ ," Soul said, and was rewarded with another stare that made his skin crawl, made him want to look over his shoulder for a lurking threat that couldn't be there because he was sitting against a _wall_ \- this was stupid. "Just raising the dead is a parlor trick. What Kid does is well beyond that."

"So you say," she said, and shrugged again. "This isn't what you came here to talk about. What is this situation we find ourselves in, and why are you involved, heretic's son?"

"Ragnarock's madness is contagious," Soul said, the words bitter on his tongue. "All of his children fall prey to it in the end. Lord Death didn't kill everyone related to Ragnarock when he imprisoned him because my family was powerful and loyal, which means we're also _useful,_ and not just as an example of what comes from defying him. I'm an outcast and I'll probably never father children, but they tolerate me because I can kill most any battle-mage I meet. If the madness takes me on the battlefield so much the better, because that means scores of enemy dead." Her stare sharpened and he couldn't really blame her, considering how many of her so-called cousins he'd killed.

"I'm going to lose control eventually, though," he continued, suddenly too conscious of the points of his teeth, of the considering way she was looking at his eyes and pale hair. "Kid would prefer I be useful before then. Your father tells me that Weapons and battle-mages can form a bond, if they're compatible in some mystical way he can't describe. He's convinced Kid not to turn me into a lich and not to kill you outright _or_ try to raise you from the dead if we can form such a bond, because in theory I can control you through it and you can somehow help me stay sane."

"And this bond will keep me alive?" she asked, no longer at ease, leaning forward with a fine tension beginning in her shoulders.

Soul shrugged. "So Spirit claims," he said, and found himself wanting to try it right there, to take whatever power the two of them might gain if only to use it to get away from the miserable situation that had become his _entire life_. "According to him it will make both of us more than we were, if we let it. Kid likes the idea of controlling you through me because attempting to raise you as a lich is risky, even for him. Better to have you alive and forced to obey him than fail to raise you and have your revenant kill us all."

She watched him for a long silent moment, then stood despite how much effort it obviously cost her and took a few deliberate paces to the bars of her cell, shackled hands rising to curl round the bars. "I think you're lying," she said, tone more than a little judgemental. "Not about the bond," she clarified when he made to protest. "About being descended from an insane heretic. That's as may be but I don't believe for a second that you're content with biding your time until the day you go mad and they kill you - and if you _are,_ then you're not worth my time or anyone else's and you _deserve_ to have your line end with you."

"Believe what you want," Soul growled, standing though he didn't remember moving. "It doesn't matter. Defying them would serve no purpose other than getting me killed even earlier. What I believe regarding my inheritance has no bearing at all on my reality, and I'm not about to get myself killed for no damn reason when it's just as easy to pretend like I believe the nonsense Kid spouts regarding my bloodline."

She snorted, green eyes all vitriol, and Soul realized that he'd closed the distance between them, was a bare step from the cell bars. "Won't die for no reason, will you?" she asked, staring up at him and giving the very distinct impression of looking _down_ at him. "So the plan is to do what you're told and _live_ for no reason instead? Pathetic."

"I am the only thing standing between you and eternity as a slave to Kid," Soul said in a rasping growl, barely able to keep still because the alternative was _breaking everything_ and the world had gone red around the edges yet again. She was a witch's pawn, an abomination, mass murderer, and she thought she had the right to _judge him_ -

"And apparently you need to use me as an excuse in order to do anything that even remotely resembles taking charge of your life," Maka said, spine straight and chin high, proud and deadly and Soul remembered that this was the Scourge, this was the woman who had killed something like hundreds of his kin and it _showed_ , made itself glaringly evident even in the way she stood and spoke and _looked_ at him. "Death Scythe thinks you're strong enough to deny me anything but what little power is required to keep me alive? You're all _fools_." She lifted her hands, threaded the shackles between the cell bars, reached for him as best she could and hissed a challenge. " _Try it_. I look forward to burning this cesspool to the ground."

The world was more than just red round the edges, and it was getting hard to think coherently enough to force it down - Soul bared his teeth and made to take that last step forward and _something_ arced between them, something skin-prickling in a way that goaded because it promised power and he was _so certain_ that her soul would taste better than anything ever had before -

A sound intruded, of something hitting stone that came with an unsettlingly bone-humming impact; the light dimmed; cold crawled over his skin and Soul snapped back to reality with a freezing jolt. He had just enough time to register that Maka was giving him a very wary look from several paces back from the bars, caution and maybe just the slightest hint of fear in her green eyes, before another footstep sounded down the hall. It was enough. He knew that power and that darkness, and he didn't need to see Spirit taking a knee down the hall to know what was coming.

"You cling to your sanity another day, then, mongrel," Kid said when he got close, and Soul didn't move from where he'd knelt with his back to the wall, eyes very, very carefully on the stone floor. "It's good that you've managed, because now you may at _last_ be of real use to me, not that it will salvage your cursed bloodline. Stand up. I don't think either of us is in danger of forgetting who holds power here."

Soul stood, too stubborn to avoid the man's amused stare, though his eyes were unnerving even on the best days - and not just because they were the gleaming gold of fresh-minted coins. Kid's coloring was a little unnerving as a whole, actually; he had skin the color of sun-bleached bone and pitch-black hair interrupted by three shocking white streaks, offset deliberately by clothing as ink-dark as his hair and a death's-head amulet at his throat. That said, Lord Death's son was not a large man; by Soul's reckoning he was probably not much taller than the Scourge herself, who barely cleared Soul's collarbones, and didn't have a lot of breadth on her either. He had a pleasant enough face and a graceful carriage that implied noble blood, and his voice when he spoke might have been rich and reassuring had it not been weighted with so much power that Soul's bones ached with it - had it not left a taste in the air like ashes and bone dust, had the death-magic in it not slithered across Soul's skin like snakeskin husks.

"And this is the fabled Scourge," Kid continued, turning his attention to the woman in the cell, who stopped giving Soul a look of utter contempt long enough to meet Kid's eyes without even a twitch to show that she found him _or_ his magic worth wasting her time on. "That you can even stand with your link to the witch severed is more than testament enough to your mettle. I almost hope this experiment of Spirit's fails, just so that I'll have the chance to possess you. How would your little family react to finding you facing them on the field, I wonder?"

"How will you react when I tear out your _heart_ ," Maka snarled, and Soul kind of - twitched, unconsciously, in response to the killing intent behind her words.

Kid just laughed, one hand rising to curl around the pendant nestled in the hollow of his throat. "You lot are quite savage, I'll give you that," he said, and gave Soul a sly, sidelong look. "It's almost a shame that you're an affront to nature. You should be well suited to this one, though. Without my father's civilizing influence he's little more than a rabid dog."

She looked at him again then, the disdain in her stare enough to make Soul flinch, if only internally. "A rabid dog wouldn't allow himself to be cowed so," she said, almost sneering.

Gold eyes flicked his way, and Kid smirked when he spoke, something hungry in his stare. "Perhaps you have a point, witch-spawn," he said, and licked his lips. "Well, perhaps you'll kill each other and save me the trouble of putting one or both of you down once you've outlived your usefulness. Your agony sustains me just as well as your blood or your souls; do put on a good show, and see that you don't keep me waiting."

And then he was - gone, dissolved into the shadows with a rush of breathless cold.


	5. I'm the same, I've just been rearranged

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how this got done so quickly, but it did, and so I am passing on the value to you, dear readers.
> 
> The game is properly afoot, now.

They carried her to a room even further beneath the earth than the dungeon, her would-be father on her left and the pale-haired Weapon on her right. Carried her, because she still couldn't walk well and everyone knew it, because they wouldn't unshackle her to let her try, because she wouldn't allow herself to be hauled about in Soul Eater's arms like a blushing bride. Firstly, because her pride would never allow it; secondly, because he _was_ the rabid dog that his death-priest had pronounced him, madness lurking behind eyes the color of fresh blood, waiting for a chance to consume him and, it seemed, her.

She had felt it, back there, when she'd challenged him and he'd surged forward, teeth bared and hungry. Had felt the power it offered, felt the screaming blackness of it, and taken several judicious steps back, grateful for the bars between them, however flimsy a barrier they were.

It had been some time since she'd last retreated. She had not even accorded that honor to the death-priest, though his magic made her want to kill him just to get the feel of it off of her skin.

They carried her, hands round her biceps as she stumbled through horrifying galleries of bone and death-magic that gave way to pitch-black rock and narrow halls carved with designs that made her stomach twist, if only because of the sullen magic that suffused them. Maka limped between her escorts, the throbbing in her leg becoming less important with each passing minute as it competed with the dizzying ache in her head, and at last found herself in a gallery with ceilings so high that the columns simply disappeared into darkness as they climbed upwards.

She wanted to ask where they were, reflexively, as though it might answer any of her more pressing questions, but she knew better than that. When Spirit faltered and came to a halt just inside the hall's entrance, Soul jolting into stillness a moment later, she gathered her wits and instead asked, "What's going on?"

"I don't know now any more than I knew the last time you asked," Death Scythe said, voice as tense as the rest of him. "All I know is that we were ordered to bring you down here, and that's more than enough bad news for me. This is where liches are raised, and where Asura and Ragnarock tried to overthrow Lord Death."

"It's a historical landmark, then," Maka drawled, lightheaded from too much movement, but only managed to smirk for a moment before pain and the gravity of her situation overwhelmed any sense of humor she might muster.

Red eyes glanced at her sidelong from her right, faint hint of a grin curving one side of Soul Eater's mouth, and then Spirit was pulling her forward again.

As they drew near to the far end of the gallery, a bit of shadow detached itself from its post next to the grand doors, which were so tall that Maka gave up trying to take in their height and breadth because it would require too much unnecessary craning of her neck. The shadow turned out to be a woman clad in inky black that contrasted almost shockingly with her pale skin, and whose fine-drawn features and fluid motions made Maka feel almost - pedestrian? Grubby, certainly, and common, and all that from a considering look and an adjustment of spectacles with elegant fingers.

"She is concussed," the woman said, tucking dark hair behind one ear as her eyes flicked over Maka head to toe. "And she can barely walk, to say nothing of the fact that she is, metaphorically speaking, bleeding to death. This is not going to be a pleasant spectacle, I'm afraid." Spirit protested, demanded to be told what was going on, but was only waved away. "Take her in, and get those shackles off of her once she's in the circle. These two have more than enough handicaps without leaving her bound hand and foot. The idea here is to give them some incentive, not to stage a massacre."

"Azusa," Spirit said, and Maka jerked in his grip, because here was _another_ enemy warrior she'd had mild apprehensions about meeting on the battlefield. "Your radiant presence brightens my day, as always. I'll ask again: what's Kid got planned?"

It hadn't even taken any effort for Spirit and Soul Eater to hold her still, and that was fucking _infuriating_ , she was going to - well. It was terrifying, actually, because it meant that they might not have been lying to her when they said her magic had never been her own. It meant she might _actually_ be wasting away, that time alone would kill her now, and dying in reach of a necromancer was the worst possible fate -

"As if he'd tell me the details," Azusa responded, unruffled, glancing over at Soul before returning her level stare to Maka, the fingers of one hand curling thoughtfully along the line of her jaw. "I'm just here to make sure they're both capable enough for this little field test."

Field test, and she couldn't even _walk_? "Get on with it," she said, and it took all of her concentration to enunciate with acceptable derision through the whirling nausea of her concussion.

"Yes, let's," Azusa said, turning to press a hand to the doors, which opened inward with a low rumble. "You'll be comatose very soon, and if we don't do this now we won't be able to. Spirit, you know what to do."

So her lifespan was supposedly down to days, her consciousness to hours. Soul Eater had a point, she supposed: their options were not exactly pleasant. She'd been running over them in her mind for much too long and concluded early on that her odds were not good, considering that the only way she wasn't going to end up dead - or _undead_ \- would be if she could somehow bind herself to a Weapon of apparently questionable sanity and loyalty. If she could, though, she'd at least survive, and time would bring options; let them think they could control her until then.

Maka didn't resist when Spirit and Soul Eater pulled her forward again, and not just because she basically couldn't, either.

The room they entered was less a room and more a coliseum, by size; it was dominated by a circular platform surrounded by a deep moat that she labeled a chasm for the sake of accuracy. They carried her across the outer ledge and then a broad bridge, her feet catching in a deep groove on the other side as they pulled her towards the center. There were other bridges, at what Maka supposed were the cardinal compass points, and a figure standing at the far northern point of the dais that she assumed to be Kid - the platform was so huge that when they first crossed the southern bridge she couldn't even make out enough details to be certain.

By the time they set her down in the center she _was_ certain, though, and certain also that the figures standing with him were her traitorous father-comrade and a blonde woman with a gold-embossed eyepatch who could only be Marie Mjolnir. It would have been comical how Stein towered over Kid if only he hadn't looked so terrible, even at that distance, and if only the power rolling off Kid hadn't been so very overwhelming. Maka found that she really _did_ miss being able to maintain her habitual mental shields, but not as much as she missed the ability to stay upright when Spirit and Soul let go of her arms and her knees wobbled and then buckled, leaving her in a heap on the ground.

"This is your only chance," Spirit said, kneeling in front of her so he could take care of her shackles.

"You expecting thanks?" she slurred, wanting nothing more than to send the entire miserable place up in flames, never more than when he pulled the metal away from her wrists and ankles and pressed one gentle hand to the top of her head.

"Survive, and I'll see you free," he said, and stood. "If you die here, in this circle, you _will_ rise again. Whose control you'll be under when you do remains to be seen. Let's not find out, all right?"

"Go away, Spirit," Soul growled, and Death Scythe obeyed, spine so straight that Maka knew he was fighting not to look back.

"Sentimental idiot," she muttered when Soul knelt beside her, and tried to ignore the death-magic oozing across her skin like cold gore.

"It's working in your favor," the Weapon said, eyes forward, riveted on Kid. "Can you get up?"

She shrugged, eyeing the side bridges, convinced she could see the outlines of other doors on the far walls. Soul sighed and took hold of her arm again, let her flinch and give him a searing glare before pulling it across his shoulders.

"I need you on your feet if at all possible," he said, and wound his arm tight around her waist before standing up, taking her with him as though she weighed nothing at all. "You're my only chance to get out of being sacrificed to Lord Death and raised as a lich, so I'll protect you if I can, but I can promise you it'll help if you can dodge whatever's coming even once."

"It may not be more than once," she said, still watching the doorways because whatever Kid might have planned was not likely to originate from him, directionally speaking. She was also lying, really, because there was that spark of something between them again, an electric filament feeding energy into her veins, but Soul Eater had not noticed and she wasn't going to point it out. Instead she kind of - picked at it, tested it, tried to get a feel for exactly what was going on. If she could figure out how to manipulate whatever fledgling bond they were forming, she could _get out_ , and then maybe she'd have the time to wonder about the _how_ and the _why_ of such a bond being possible.

"Hopefully that'll be all I need," he said, all low rumbling voice and pale hair and eyes the red of blood, of madness, and Maka shifted a bit, trying to put him between her and the paths to the platform from which she thought trouble might come. Soul watched Kid and Maka watched the exits, but the real threat came from beneath, as all the deep-carved patterns on the dais flared with power at Kid's word and the feel of the magic on her skin shifted to something more like clammy, grasping hands.

"What is this," she hissed, and Soul glanced at her over his shoulder.

"This is how liches are born," he said, looking away when a low rumble began from their left. "If we die in this circle, we'll rise again, just like Spirit said. Kid will own me if that happens. I don't know about you, but I would prefer not to find out, considering the alternative if he can't control you is basically 'everyone dies.'"

"I do not plan to die here," she said, testing that tenuous link, following it to its source and finding it unguarded. If she could just find the opportune moment -

The rumble gave way to a roar, Soul tensed, and a behemoth bounded across the western bridge and flung itself at them, all bared teeth and razor-honed horns and reaching claws.

Soul threw himself to the left, dashing away with a snarl and a bristling phalanx of scythe-blades directly in the beast's path. Maka couldn't blame him for hoping he could make the damn thing impale itself, but Kid was smarter than that: he'd chosen one of the beasts with thick armor, so much so that it fetched up against the blades with a snarl, scrabbled around a bit, and threw itself after Soul without any indication that it had taken damage.

Maka ducked right in a neat roll, ignoring her leg and her nausea and the white noise of the pain in her head in favor of staying out of the line of fire.

It _was_ impressive, she thought, detached; Soul Eater was a Weapon with skills that Kid had been a fool to marginalize. Not many of them could manipulate their surroundings into weapons, and fewer still could do it repeatedly. Oh, Spirit could - all the Death Scythes could, because they had feasted on the souls of her brethren, but for a Weapon who was not so privileged to do what Soul was doing, dodging, attacking, shifting his body and shifting the stone around him, was atypical indeed. Perhaps that was part of why he was so outcast: it did not do to have madness-prone heretics realizing that they were powerful enough to cause real trouble.

Oh, and he could, she knew just watching. Untrained, it seemed, but strong, strong enough and canny enough to make up for it, vicious and _fast_. Barely as fast as the beast, though, because this was a feline behemoth, if one discounted the horns and the scorpion tail and the spikes along its spine. Soul dodged a blurring swipe and ducked out of the way of fangs practically as big as he was, managing to hit it with another barrage of scythe blades that knocked it off balance long enough for him to dash away.

When he looked at her his eyes had gone dark, red spiraling into black, and Maka knew she was out of time because she had no desire to find out what might happen if she took hold of his offered strength when his madness was at the fore.

She reached for the link between them, felt the hum of power, saw, in her mage-sight, the breadth of Soul's connection to his magic and the incomprehensible vastness of it; took a deep, steadying breath, marshaled all her will - and shattered the barriers between them.

Soul hit the floor like a marionette with cut strings, but Maka didn't see, couldn't see, was only aware of the power shrieking through her and the crush of another's consciousness.

They'd always told her she was nothing, could be nothing, would be forever atoning for the sins of the past, that she _owed them_ , had to make up for wrongs that had happened centuries ago -

She was the strongest, the _best_ , outstripped her teachers in record time and no one would talk to her because they were scared, jealous, totally outclassed -

It was only that hellish strength that kept them from killing her in her sleep, that and ingrained fear of madness -

Her nerves were _on fire_ , calf snarling into knots, shoulder screaming protest as whatever healing ability her heretic's blood conferred doubled back on itself in a feedback loop that felt like dying -

All she'd ever had was her brother, who sat up with her when she couldn't sleep, told her stories, laughed at the others who were too weak and too scared to understand anything important -

Except her brother was a traitor -

Her brothers were gone, couldn't save her, her father had sold her for his own profit and her mother was gone, had always been gone -

They'd laughed at her for her entire life and she'd _show them_ , she'd be more than they could _ever imagine_ , there was more to her life than the war and one ancestor's failure to see his coup through to the end

The battle-mage was unsettlingly attractive when she wasn't glowering but that didn't matter, couldn't matter, she was the only chance he had and he _refused to let them own him_

The Weapon was weak and yet here they were

Fire and light flared in the emptiness that had occupied her chest since she woke in the necromancer's dungeon and Maka surged forward on newly-healed legs, threw herself close to Soul and let her world turn to flames until she heard the behemoth screech, until she felt Kid's ire and Spirit's surprise echoing down the link between her and the Weapon.

She'd show them -

The behemoth had been startled and singed by the fire but not defeated by a long shot, and when the firestorm died down it roared at her, loud enough to rattle her ribs, and Maka _didn't care_ and _wasn't afraid_.

Soul moved when she did, in control of his body but slaved to her decisions, and they both exploded into motion in the same instant.

The beast tried to track them both and failed, distracted by the jagged patterns they were running, and all it could do when Soul leapt onto its back was howl and rear, what would have been a bloodcurdling roar cut short when Maka's fist crashed into the armored plates of its chest, lighting snapping round her arm and into its flesh. It crashed to the ground and Maka rolled away, laughing, buoyant with power, and leapt more than twice her height into the air to land next to Soul. He bared all his pointed teeth in some macabre caricature of a smile, took her hand, and together their fists crashed into the thing's spine, earth and fire magic blending into an unstoppable destructive force that cracked armor and snapped bone and sent the behemoth to the ground, never again to rise.

" _Take them,_ " Kid snapped, and his small host of personal guards swarmed the dias, perhaps two dozen at the outside, and Maka kept laughing.

They couldn't _take her_ , she was the goddamn _Scourge_ ;

They'd never best her, she had noble blood and Ragnarock had never been mad;

Too much time had been wasted trying to be harmless, fit in, play nice, time wasted being _scared_

Neither of them moved when the guards swarmed the platform, except for Maka pulling her hand free of Soul's.

She noticed, as Kid's elite guards ran headlong into scythe blades and fire, that the blood trickling from the only wound Soul had taken from the behemoth was an interesting shade of black-garnet, and filed that fact away for later consideration. In the meantime, Marie was stalking across the bridge, looking grim, Spirit and Azusa not far behind, and they had a real fight on their hands at last.

/

He divided it clearly into _before_ and _after_ , because he had to. Because before all he'd been doing was trying to prolong his existence despite knowing that in the end he didn't have any chance against the behemoth, which was not remarkably large for its kind but which _was_ remarkably well-armored and fast, not to mention excessively savage. Being near Maka would have that effect, though, considering that witch-magic sent them into a foaming rage. Except there was the part where it had attacked _him_ , which wasn't typically how these things went, regardless of the fact that he'd provoked it.

And then there was _after_ , and he didn't even realize he'd hit the floor until he saw Maka standing over him, defending, and picked himself up, because he'd been somewhere else entirely, where -

He was the pinnacle of his breed, fire and lightning was a rare enough combination of abilities but the light, that was unheard-of, was in fact _new_ -

The others were cousins, family, but distant, skittish, and in the end only two would ever be called _brother_ -

Raucous laughter and dark skin, competitions to see who could call the biggest firestorm and which of them was better at arm wrestling -

No, he only had one brother, and Wes had left him behind because -

Because he was _afraid_ \- no - afraid and _lonely_ , and that couldn't excuse anything because afraid and lonely summarized Soul's _life_ -

Fear was an unknown.

He snapped back into reality but not _into control_. Maka targeted the behemoth and he moved at her will, power roaring like static in his ears, crawling under his skin with little electric bursts that made his hair stand on end, and when she came within arm's length taking her hand was no more a choice than snapping the thing's spine. Killing Kid's guard was so easy that it was actually boring, and he cocked his head as they died and remembered another reality, a dim, bleak other-life where taking more than one of them in a fight would have been a death sentence.

Then the Death Scythes stalked across the bridge and he wanted to breathe smoke, watched Azusa most of all because she was the danger, the threat, the one who would strike to kill at all their weakest points. Spirit would hesitate because he was _weak_ , and Marie was watching him as she walked as though with a specific goal in mind, one that didn't involve him dying if her complete lack of killing intent was any indication.

Death Scythes. Even Spirit would have been able to take him, before - no, that wasn't right. Spirit was among the strongest of them, objectively speaking, but there was a hesitation in him, a restraint that spoke of his unwillingness to commit unnecessary violence, and the fact that he had turned traitor and in the end refused to own even that single ambitious act was damning. Still, _any_ Death Scythe should have been able to flatten him without breaking a sweat, would have been able to fifteen minutes ago.

Instead he met Marie head-on, leapt off the behemoth's corpse when Maka did and blocked the other Weapon's sledgehammer strike with a negligent ease that made him start laughing almost as madly as Maka had been. He dodged and countered, body moving with a feral grace he'd never possessed before, with a skill that came from someone else's lifetime spent striving for precision and perfection when it came to killing the enemy, with a raw energy that belonged to someone with unquestioning conviction and a cause to fight for. The Death Scythes would be easy enough to dispatch, and once that was done they could end Kid and her craven failure of a sire before burning everything to ash and going home.

And then Marie backhanded him with single-minded viciousness and a jolt of power like being hit by a boulder, and Soul's entire world shook.

The link that Maka had forced wide open and laid claim to wavered, and Soul felt his knees hit the floor yet again as vertigo crashed into him, vertigo and the worst kind of double vision, his and Maka's in nauseating tandem.

Spirit's hands closed round his arms when he faltered, when the link crumbled - _no_. Soul shook his head and took a hitching breath that hurt more than he'd thought possible because it was out of time with hers, felt his heart fucking careen into his ribcage as it struggled to resume its own rhythm instead of the one Maka was imposing, dug his fingers into the stone until they screamed protest because at least that small pain was grounding. _His_ body, _his_ will, _his_ link to control.

He clamped down on the bond between them with the same merciless tenacity he reserved for keeping the madness in the corners of his mind at bay, and Maka sagged in her father's arms.

When Soul got his breathing under control and was certain he wasn't going to throw up he reached blindly towards Marie, who was still standing over him, and was rewarded when she caught hold of him and pulled him to his feet with more care than he would have dared hope for.

"Thanks," he said, and it wasn't 'thanks for helping' so much as 'thanks for not killing me.'

"I know crazy when I see it," she said, letting him pitch forward to lean on her, chin resting on her shoulder and one arm around her to hold himself up while he tried to catch his breath. "She rolled you, but you weren't gone for good. Try to make sure you don't let that happen again, though, or Kid may not let us try to bring you back to your senses."

Soul grunted an affirmative, wondered if one could just - wake up, and be a different person. He fucking felt like it.

"You're awfully nice for a Death Scythe," he muttered, and Marie was still chuckling in his ear when Kid stalked forward, saw to the reanimating husks of his guards, and sent Maka to sleep with a touch of his hand and a thoroughly disgusted look.


	6. They stare at me while I stare at you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took longer than I meant it to. Nonetheless, let's pretend I was timely and that the chapter is good (it is not what I intended).

"...still asleep?"

Soul came awake with a start on the tail end of someone's question, head swimming with dreams that couldn't have been his.

"I was told that she would sleep until someone woke her," another voice answered, and Soul managed to stop fixating on burning the city down long enough to identify it as Azusa. "How dragging her here didn't do the trick, I couldn't tell you."

"And Soul?"

A dismissive tut. "Ragnarock's spawn sleeps as well. If the link between them is strong enough that magic cast on one affects the other, it will be a blessing, and more so if the bond amplifies it."

"Maybe," said the other, and Soul heard someone take a seat - on one of the dungeon's benches, if he were to judge by the general quality of the blanket he was tangled in. "Anyway, you're relieved."

" _Finally_ ," Azusa said, and it was only once her footsteps had faded that Soul let himself move, one hand trailing along the stone wall as he pushed himself into an approximation of a seated position, glad to note that his shoulder seemed healed as he did so. Things got a bit complicated halfway through sitting up thanks to the blanket, and he nearly shredded it - set it on _fire_ \- before remembering that he probably wouldn't get another one. That gave him enough patience to untangle himself and sit, swinging his legs over the side of the cot so he could rest his elbows on his thighs, yawn, and consider destroying the blanket _anyway_ , because he was so very sick of the way his life was going.

Thoughts of textile destruction came to an abrupt and very alarming halt not when he confirmed that he'd been locked in a dungeon cell, but when the eyes watching him on the other side of the bars were not Spirit's or Marie's but _Stein's_ , strange greyed-out green behind battered glasses and a crooked smile that made Soul glad for the barrier between them.

"You gutless _traitor_ ," he spat, and not even the _inflection_ was his.

"Fascinating," Stein said, not moving from his splay-legged sprawl on the bench. "You two may have taken things just a little too far, you know."

"As if I had any choice," Soul said, forcing the parts of his brain that felt like Maka as far back as he could, an act that left him with a headache and shaking hands but also a mercifully clearer head. "She was trying to kill you, you know. Take the Death Scythes, you, and Kid before burning everything else to the ground."

Stein's answering shrug was the definition of droll. "Kill me, eh?" he asked, raising a hand to push his glasses further up his nose and then to rub at the jagged scar that curved across his face. "Me, and the Death Scythes, and Kid only after that? Very interesting indeed. Her priorities aren't usually so dictated by her emotions. I wonder what caused that."

Soul just stared at him in silence, mouth pulled into a dissatisfied line, and tried not to think about the fact that he knew Maka was still asleep, knew that whoever had put her on the cell's cot hadn't bothered much with comfort, that she'd have stiff joints and a screaming headache when she woke. Did his best not to act on the fact that here, in this strange _after_ , he knew he could tap the link between them and tear the dungeon apart, kill Stein without breaking a sweat, leave his entire life behind and never even want to look back.

No regrets was hardly his style. Dear shadows, his head hurt.

"You have lovely eyes," Stein said after a few minutes' observation, and stopped tracing his scars in favor of tugging at the hem of the thick, storm-grey shirt he'd been given. Soul didn't blame him; the shirt was old and soft and didn't fit quite right, just like all the clothes Soul had ever been given, an uncomfortable detail he'd always found maddening. "Much nicer than your brother's."

"Aren't you supposed to be dying of power exhaustion?" Soul growled, trying to ignore the dream-images playing in his head and writing off his headache as caused by the clearly unhinged battle-mage in front of him. He _had_ to figure out how to close off this link or he was going to lose his damn mind, and wouldn't _that_ be ironic?

"Ah, no," Stein said, slow smile disappearing and posture straightening as he looked to his right. "Your Marie seems capable of keeping me alive, though I _am_ quite fatigued still. We don't have anything like what you and Maka do." He turned back to Soul, mouth curling back into unsettling humor. "I don't think anyone does, or has. Spirit seems... _distressed_."

"Having met you," Soul said, and had to immediately shove back a slew of disjointed memories of Stein that weren't his, "I think I'm glad you aren't her father after all."

"Ssh," Stein said, putting a finger to his lips. "That's a secret."

"It won't be for long," Soul said, and stood, ignoring the phantom twinge in his calf and the way his knees moved only under protest, like rusted hinges. "Stay here and soon enough Marie will know everything you know, whether you want her to or not."

"That's a double-edged sword, you know," Stein said, brows high. "And I'd think that, since _we_ will not be doing whatever it is _you_ did, it's also much less _likely._ What _did_ you do, incidentally? Does Maka know everything you do, now?"

" _I_ was just trying to stay alive," Soul said, wishing he was still asleep as he crossed his arms over his chest. "Your charming little _daughter_ decided to force the link as wide open as she possibly could without any warning, and the results were as you saw."

Stein gave him a wide smile and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fingers steepled together. "She rolled your mind, you know," he said, and Soul ignored the goosebumps he was getting from the way the man was staring at him. "You fought like she does - I'd recognize her technique anywhere, and it was especially obvious coming from _you._ That aside - you did _what_ she wanted, _when_ she wanted. If you'd been fighting back, I'm fairly certain the hesitation that would have caused would have gotten the both of you killed." He cocked his head to the side. "What's to say she won't do it again once she's awake?"

Soul snorted, anger overriding his unease, and gave Stein a scathing glare. He really would have preferred to be allowed to kill this particular battle-mage. "She won't catch me off-guard again," he said, "and if she can't manage that, then she can't pull that little trick again."

"Oh?" Stein cocked his head in the opposite direction, still grinning, a raven eyeing something that might or might not be food. "You think you can best her in a battle of wills? You're an arrogant one - but then, you don't know what we go through before Medusa sends us to war."

He _did,_ actually. With an immediacy that meant he might as well have gone through that training himself. Still, Soul was not exactly weak-willed; if he had been, he'd have gone mad and been killed in childhood.

"Doesn't matter what you think," he said, gruff, tamping down on the memories before they could set their hooks in him. "And if you don't want to die, you'd better start hoping that I'm right."

That earned him a shrug, but at least Stein stopped staring at him for a minute, long enough to look off to the side again - for what, Soul had no idea. "Maka's smart. She might want to kill me and tear this place apart, but there's no way she isn't very aware of the situation. Firstly, she has to keep _you_ alive, which I'm sure will prove complicated if she lets on that she's dangerous. It doesn't seem to me that Kid or Lord Death value you very highly, Soul Eater. I'm _certain_ they'd threaten your life to ensure her cooperation. Secondly, as you said: she'd have to overpower you again if she wants to get out of here, which you seem to think isn't going to happen. Third - well. I do wonder what Spirit said to her when he left her on that platform with the behemoth."

"I don't speak your abominable tongue, so I'm certain I don't know," Soul said, and resolutely didn't pause to ask why he was lying for her sake - it sure as hell wasn't for Spirit. "Tell me - what is it that can drive a battle-mage to turn on his mistress?"

Again Stein brushed his fingers across the scar that ran slantwise across his face, curving from his hairline across the bridge of his nose to the opposite side of his jaw, and suppressed another of his mad grins. "Ah. Medusa relegated me to the research side of the war after I got these scars," he said. "Whatever the truth is about the power source she's got under that tower of hers, I can tell you with certainty that working with it on a regular basis was driving me well past the edge of madness. I'm sure you of all your kin can appreciate that, no?"

Soul stared at him for probably well over a minute, jaw clenched, teeth aching, ignoring the way he could feel Maka's heartbeat thrumming out of time with his own. "I wouldn't sell my kin, _if_ I had any that I cared about, just to save myself," he said at last, voice as sharp as his teeth. "I won't even sell _myself_ , if you haven't heard that story from my brother. If I can keep that same madness at bay as a child, why can't _you,_ as a grown man, as one of the most powerful of your kind? Too scared to try?"

"Too selfish to risk it," Stein replied without missing a beat, smile never faltering. "And don't make the mistake of thinking that we all have the same strong morals that Maka does. That'll get you killed."

"But you brought Maka back when you found her," Soul said, slowly, trying to reconcile seemingly conflicting facts.

"Suzume understands me," Stein said, and his smile was, for once, mostly just good-humored. "It's a shame I don't suit her _tastes_ , shall we say."

"She doesn't have very good taste, from what I hear," Soul said, and was rewarded with a startled cackle from Stein that bent him nearly double and drew the attention of whoever he'd been staring at down the hall.

"Play nice," called a voice, and Stein quieted with gratifying speed.

Marie. Soul should have known.

"All right," Stein said, sitting back up. "I'm sure you can guess the situation, but I'll clarify just in case: you're on the opposite end of the dungeon from Maka, because certain entities seem to think that housing you two close together might be inviting unnecessary trouble. You've both been out for well over a day now, so I'm going to get you some food - okay," he amended when Marie yelled something, "I'm going to have someone else bring you food, and once you've eaten we're going to see if you can wake Maka up. No one else has had any success so far, so you're the next logical choice. Besides, everyone is _dying_ to see how you two interact now."

"Are they," Soul said, unconvinced. "Let me out of here. I'm obviously not under anyone's control, or I'd have killed you by now."

"As if they'd trust me with the keys to the cells," Stein said, smirking, and got to his feet. "Everything in good time. Sit tight."

Soul rolled his eyes and dropped back onto the cot, pressing his back against the cool stone wall and willing it to ease his aching head. It didn't, of course; he gave the ceiling a disgruntled stare and listened to Stein talk to Marie, watched the battle-mage walk past his cell again with a wink that he replied to with a rude gesture and bared teeth. Marie entered his field of vision a moment later and Soul composed himself hurriedly, expression blanking and hands dropping harmless into his lap.

"Stein will bring back your supper and Spirit," Marie said, gold eye flashing amusement at him. "We can't have you waking up the Scourge without proper precautions in place. I'm not saying she's _going_ to do anything drastic," she continued when Soul made to protest, "but I'm not willing to take any chances, you understand? We've never seen anything like what you did back there with the behemoth, and truthfully - it's rather frightening that the strongest bond we've ever seen between one of us and a battle-mage had to involve one of Ragnarock's children and the Scourge."

Soul couldn't help the smile that spread across his face, and didn't bother to try. "Enough to make a Death Scythe scared, huh? That does make it a little less unbearable, knowing that I make you lot nervous now."

She gave him an odd, soft look that was mostly regret. "You've always made us a bit nervous, Soul Eater," she said, one hand rising seemingly of its own volition to her eyepatch.

"You've had pretty funny ways of expressing your concern," he grumbled, unable to enjoy needling her because, as he'd commented just before falling gracelessly unconscious, she _was_ awfully nice for a Death Scythe - in general, really. It was a wonder she'd attained that rank with any empathy intact.

She didn't respond to him other than to shrug and look away, and they sat in silence until Stein came back with Spirit in tow, the Death Scythe carrying a tray of food and looking just nervous enough to make Soul grin at him through a rush of Maka's vitriol.

"Eat," Spirit said, waiting for Marie to unlock the cell door before shoving the food Soul's way. "Then we'll see if you can wake our guest."

Soul was hardly paying attention by then, though, much too busy with making his food disappear as quickly as possible. Spirit had brought him another really excellent meal, at least by his standards: thick stew that was as much meat as vegetables in rich broth, with bread to sop it up and a wedge of cheese accompanied by a generous glass of water and a smaller cup of hot mulled wine. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen _wine_.

"Does he not get fed?" Marie asked, frowning at the way Soul was attacking his food, and Spirit shrugged.

"He gets something," the man said, though his tone suggested that he was beginning to doubt that 'something' was ever sufficient. "It wouldn't surprise me if they'd been feeding him the stuff no one else wanted, though."

" _Brilliant_ ," Marie said, incensed, and Soul stopped stuffing his face long enough to look at her in surprise. It might, he thought, have been the first time anyone had bothered to be offended for his sake.

Soul finished his food under the watchful eyes of two Death Scythes and one traitorous battle-mage, then let Stein take away the dishes. Spirit might have expected that Soul would wait for him or Marie to lead the way, but Soul was done cooling his heels. He pushed past Spirit in the cell doorway and made a sharp left, heading towards Maka without anyone having to tell him where to go, the bond starburst-bright in his head as he drew closer. Behind him, Marie raised an eyebrow at Spirit, received an annoyed shrug and jerk of the head in response, and the Death Scythes followed without comment.

Maka was once again curled up on her cell's cot, the cool stillness of the dungeon's death-magic heavy upon her like a shroud. By the time he reached her cell, Soul's headache had disappeared - not a good sign, he supposed, but not _surprising_ \- and he gave Spirit and Marie an expectant look.

"You wanted me to try and wake her up, right? I can't do that from here," he said, and didn't bother questioning his itching need to close the distance between them. It more or less made sense, given the bond and the newness of it, and he _knew_ that his will was his own, so it wasn't important. The fact that he was obviously compromised _was_ , considering the way he couldn't quite shake a stubborn feeling of - affinity, maybe, of _allegiance_ , to a woman who was not only the penultimate example of the enemy but who, on a personal level, wanted him dead. There wasn't time to dwell on that, though, and Soul figured that acknowledging and then doing his best to work around it was all he could do.

"You think you can?" Spirit asked, eyes riveted on his daughter with an intensity to rival Soul's. "Is she just sleeping, or did the spell affect her more strongly than we expected?"

"As if I'd know," Soul said, rolling his shoulders in a vain attempt to dissipate the itch between them and wishing for another bath. "She's asleep. She's - dreaming. About home." _That_ he made an effort to ignore after the initial flash of warm memory.

"I don't think I've ever heard of a link this strong, if you're picking up on dreams," Marie said, lone eye gleaming at him in the low light. "Tread carefully, Soul Eater."

"I know that she's going to attempt any number of things," Soul said. "It's not even a question of _if._ I _know_." He scowled at Marie and Spirit. "Just like I know that you two will kill one or both of us, preferably just _me_ , if things start to go wrong here. Knowing my impending fate, open the door."

"Watch yourself," Spirit said as Marie unlocked the door and ushered him in, and Soul rolled his eyes. Of _course_ he was going to watch himself, and most certainly _not_ because he was dealing with a powerful man's secret bastard daughter. Certain aspects of the situation completely eclipsed _that_ aspect, most especially the fact that Maka could and would be trying to break his will from the moment she woke up.

She wouldn't kill him, though, because she needed him if she was going to stay alive. Soul reminded himself of that a few times, took a deep breath, then another, squared his shoulders, and stepped closer to her sleeping form. After a moment's consideration he reached for her shoulder, anticipating a violent retaliation and not so much surprised by as resigned to the fact that he apparently wasn't afraid of her any more.

Instead he felt a jolt run through her when his hand touched her shoulder, saw her eyes fly open as she snapped out of her dream, and pulled away on instinct. Maka half-turned towards him from her position facing the wall, one hand darting out to close round his wrist. Soul froze, unease thick in his throat, and stared in stunned - kind of _horrified_ \- silence as she rolled the rest of the way over, green eyes unfocused, and _rubbed her thumb across his open palm_ , looking a little confused and more than a little thoughtful, mouth pulled into a considering frown.

He was grateful beyond measure that his back was to Spirit and Marie, which ensured that they were _not_ witnessing - whatever was going on.

The half-dreamy look in her eyes vanished as quickly as he had the thought, replaced by what he was coming to realize was her resting state of calculated murderous intent. Her hand snapped from his wrist to the collar of his shirt and dragged him into an uncomfortable half-bend, but she wasn't really paying him much mind. By the time she'd gotten him where she wanted him Maka was sitting up, feet firmly on the ground, staring over his shoulder at the Death Scythes outside the now-locked door of her cell and _pressing_ on the bond between them, looking for an opening.

"Is this how you treat the person responsible for the fact that you're still alive?" Soul asked, muscles protesting but ever so slightly afraid to wrestle himself free of her grip, sweat tracing down his jaw from the strain of resisting her.

The pressure vanished - he let go of the breath he'd been holding, let some of the tension leave his shoulders - and she turned her head towards him, enough so that she spoke into the hair on the back of his neck. He didn't have to look, though, to know that her eyes never left her father and Marie even as she spoke too quietly for them to understand. "You're still breathing, aren't you?"

Soul swore under his breath when he realized she'd positioned him so that he couldn't even brace himself on her cot to accommodate his protesting muscles. He had a response on the tip of his tongue when she chuckled in his ear, and he realized _why_ she'd maneuvered him the way she had - realized with a feeling like being punched in the stomach that nothing she did was ever without motive just in time for her will to crash against his. It drove the breath out of his lungs, rattled his bones, and would have sent him to the ground but for her hand holding him up.

He fought her, though - set his feet, kept hold of himself and the link and his sanity, and _endured._ She finally relented after a thousand small eternities and Soul came back to himself to realize that he was sweating bullets, his chin was buried in her shoulder, and naught more than seconds could have passed or _surely_ Spirit would have done something.

"If you kill me, you kill yourself," he panted, willing his knees not to give out.

"Ah, and you'll never know if that's why I didn't, will you," she said, her tone dripping wicked amusement, then pitched her voice higher so that the others could hear. "Was there something you wanted from me, savages?"

"They wanted to see if he could wake you up," Stein said, and Soul couldn't hold back a little groan of dismay at the man's reappearance. "No one else has been able to so far."

"How long have I been asleep?" Maka asked after a breathless, surprised pause, and the cant of her head and the way her breath made his spine go to ice made it quite clear that her question was directed at Soul.

"Not more than two days is what Stein told me," he said, and jumped when Maka went stiff with what he automatically assumed was outrage but which the bond, when he examined it, told him was actually surprise bordering on shock.

She didn't loosen her grip, but she did wrench him around so that he was looking directly at her, which wasn't really any easier on his muscles or his back.

"Picked up a few things from me, did you?" she said, not really asking, and Soul blinked at her in surprise.

"He doesn't even know," Stein said from behind him, voice thick with suppressed laughter. It was just enough for Soul's anger to override his caution, and, growling, he at last fought against Maka's grip - it was the _Scourge_ in front of him, he reminded himself, it was the thrice-damned _Scourge_ whispering in his ear - except Maka only rolled her eyes and used her free hand to press on a spot just behind his collarbone.

His vision went a bit black, and when the pain went away and he could see again he was on his knees on the floor, head pressed against her leg.

"I doubt that Kid will want to perpetuate this if the Scourge is the one with the upper hand," Marie was saying, and Soul tensed, baring his teeth - he hadn't given her an inch, she was still harmless -

Maka's hand on his head jolted him into startled stillness.

"If she overpowered his mind once, do you think the effects might - "

Peace proved fleeting. Soul surged to his feet, shaking off Maka's hand before she could try to hold him in place, and crowded close to the bars and the startled Death Scythes on the other side.

" _Fuck_ you," he snarled, shaking a little with how badly he wanted to end the whole farce with a few well-placed scythe blades. "You reward me for capturing the enemy's greatest soldier by forcing me into a pact with her and you have the _gall_ to wonder if I'm too weak to withstand her? Have you seen her so much as make a threatening move, let _alone_ manifest power? If I was _weak_ \- if I decided on a whim that, say, I wanted you dead for helping Kid make my life miserable - _trust_ me, you'd be _dead_. She would have burned down this _entire city_ without a second thought."

He took a deep, ragged breath. "You might not believe me or you might not think she can, but you can't feel how badly she _wants it,_ you don't know how powerful she could be if I let her."

Stein's smile was as jagged as Soul's breathing. "I know," he said, hand back to tugging at his collar. "If you let her, we'd all be ashes. Don't let her. That temper has always been one of her greatest flaws."

"How deeply _unfortunate,_ " Soul said, hands white-knuckled on the cell bars. "It seems we have a flaw in common."

"Don't kill them," Stein said, leaning around Spirit to address Marie before anyone else could respond. "This is _fascinating_. I don't know if it goes both ways yet, but their personalities are bleeding into each other like nothing I've ever seen. He didn't even realize he wasn't speaking his own mother tongue. Do you think the reason Maka controlled him so easily is because on some level he sees her will as his own now?"

"Quiet," Marie said, not looking away from Soul, though the ominous cast to her expression lifted somewhat.

Soul didn't really notice, though, his outrage forgotten and hands lax on the bars as he tried desperately to decipher whether or not he'd been speaking the language he thought he had for the past several minutes. _Had_ Maka managed to twist his mind? Was it just bleedover, knowledge settling in alongside all the jumbled memories and information glut that he hadn't even begun to decipher? Was she bending him to her will in more subtle ways or was this all just a mess -

He registered a sigh from behind him, tired and put-upon, and Maka appeared at his elbow, tilting her head towards him just enough to let her give him the kind of side-eyed look that Soul thought mothers must reserve for particularly recalcitrant children. Her hand curled round the crook of his elbow and calm descended, anger and confusion and fear shoved aside in favor of clarity, of silence. It was not that she soothed him, either.

"I'll ask once more," she said, speaking slowly and very deliberately in the Weapons' language this time. "Was there something you two wanted from me, or did you just wake me up to entertain the traitor?"

No, she didn't soothe him. The contact strengthened the link between them, made his sense of her mental and physical state more clear; it imparted to him a measure of her unbreakable control, and _that_ was what had pushed aside his inner conflict.

"We wanted to see if you could be woken without resorting to extremes," Marie said, unruffled.

Maka's eyes moved from Marie to Spirit to Stein, settling at last on her father. "You wanted to see if this man beside me would fail," she said, chin high and still just barely up to Soul's collarbones, voice sharp enough to cut crystal. "You have used him for the entirety of his life and given him nothing in return; you have rewarded skill and power and earnestness with abuse and derision, and now all any of you are doing is putting him in hopeless situation after hopeless situation while you wait for him to die or submit to your false god of decay and dust."

She paused, and looked at Soul from the corner of her eye again, this time somber; Spirit looked like she'd punched him, Stein all macabre amusement, and Marie just - grim.

"It may not be in my best interests to explain this to you, but it does surprise me that none of you seem concerned with the fact that he could, at any moment, give me the power to kill all of you," Maka said, quietly enough that the ossuary-magic of the dungeon dampened her words into a hushed murmur. "You worry that he isn't strong enough to fight me off, but what if he doesn't care to, Death Scythe, Hammer? What if you push him too far and he opts for revenge? Would you blame him for buckling at last under the wounds you inflicted as though they were somehow his fault, or would you admit responsibility before I killed you? I wonder."

Soul didn't see the others' reactions, because he was staring down at the top of her head, shocked enough that his mouth had gaped open enough to expose the points of his teeth.

"Marie," Spirit said into the silence that followed, eyes never leaving Maka, "take Stein and go tell Kid that she's awake. Make sure he knows that Soul has things in hand."

Marie looked at Spirit, nodded; looked at Maka and at Soul, misgivings in her eye and the set of her jaw; left without a word, one hand catching Stein by the arm so she could pull him along while he laughed.

"I'm going to go down the hall to the guards' station," Spirit said once she had gone. "Let me know once you've decided what you need."

"Go," Maka said, tone still knife-edged, and Spirit obeyed, but not before giving her a look that made Soul avert his eyes - affection, a parent's dismay, prickling fear laced with perhaps a touch of despair.

"Now," Maka said once he was out of earshot, stepping away - madness and residual rage crept back in along the edges of his mind as it fell back into the disarray that had been Soul's norm since he woke - "we have a lot to discuss. Sit."

Soul swallowed, watched her for exactly eight out of sync heartbeats, and took a seat on her cot, pressing his back to the wall and trying to ignore the feeling that his world was going down in flames.


	7. You are the only chance I'll take

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys. I'm so sorry. I finished the last chapter and wrote a chunk of this one and then I moved 3000 miles away and the holidays happened and I don't have any real, coherent excuses. But! Here it is, for better or worse, and I'm working on an outline for the rest of the story (because I thought I already had one but apparently not). Work on chapter 8 should start very soon. Thanks for sticking with me!

_"Do not think that we are allies simply because I acknowledged the fact that your so-called family has abused you for as long as you've been alive," Maka had said once Spirit left and Soul had taken a seat, and he'd shuttered his expression and blocked the link between them as best he could._

It was days before they were let out of the dungeons. A matter of timing, Spirit said, because Kid wanted to have a bit of a public spectacle, and the new moon that heralded the greatest waxing of his powers had not quite arrived. Maka didn't care, but Soul knew that that detail didn't bode well, and was glad that he hadn't been left in the cell with her for much longer than it took for her to verbally cut him to ribbons.

In the intervening days they were guarded by Death Scythes at all hours, and Maka wasn't the only one watched closely for any signs of dangerous intent. She stayed quiet, though, her sharp tongue the only weapon she chose to wield, and even Azusa, whose greatest skill lay in perceiving weak points and falsehoods, was fooled when Maka claimed and Soul confirmed that she was too weak to do much more than verbally abuse her captors.

He didn't have as many misgivings about being willfully complicit in high treason as he had expected.

_"I recognize," Maka had continued when he didn't respond, green eyes like edged glass, "that they are fools, both in their mistreatment and their distrust of you. They are weak for letting Kid dictate right and wrong without ever questioning him. You, though - you know better." She'd tapped her temple, eyes never leaving his. "I_ know _it, now. You have the strength of character to form your own beliefs, the prescience to question, and you're_ stronger _than them. You could have killed Spirit if you were pressed, though I'm not sure you'd have walked away from that fight. Now, with me, it wouldn't even be a contest. Do you even_ understand _that? You're letting misguided fanatics dictate your entire life and you're strong enough that you could have fought back. You could have left. You could have forced them to recognize you, one way or another, and here you are instead, bowing your head and apologizing for something that wasn't your fault. Here you are, with the strength to be free, letting yourself stay caged."_

When the time came, after days of interminable waiting in which Soul could _feel_ her plotting and planning and biding her time but was not made _aware_ of whatever the plan was, Spirit and Azusa collected him first. He realized why when they marched him to the Scourge's cell and dropped a set of manacles into his hands that had been purpose-made to be heavy and awkward.

Soul didn't _protest_ , because Maka was a murderous monster, but he did hesitate, because the little warm memory-flashes he got from her sometimes made these things feel somehow excessive.

"Do it," Azusa snapped, and Soul edged into the cell through the narrow door, sighing and hoping, as had become distressingly usual, that he wasn't about to get himself killed.

The fury in Maka's stare when she unfolded from her habitual position on her cot with her back to the wall made Soul's skin crawl, so much so that he hesitated again. This time _she_ was the one whose lips thinned, annoyed.

"Get on with it," she said, voice as taut as the air between them, and Soul swallowed hard, shuffled forward, throttled down his screaming alarm instinct. He snapped the shackles around her wrists, reminding himself that she wouldn't kill him and trying to ignore the fire-heat seething under her skin, the only power that even her considerable temper could invoke now. After that it was a matter of kneeling, doing the same to her ankles, taking a deep, deep breath to quiet the jitters that being so close to her when she was so angry engendered, and standing back up.

Her eyes when he straightened were no longer furious, at least not _at him_ \- merely disdainful, too knowledgeable, judging. Soul didn't meet them for long.

Azusa offered only a dismissive sniff as she watched Maka shuffle out of the cell, unable to take much of a stride thanks to her bonds. She left once she'd told Spirit to see them to their destination while she made sure all the preparations were taken care of, a sleek shadow disappearing into the ossuary's distant shadows.

"She's too weak to pose a threat and a little too smart to try, I'd think," the Death Scythe said. "See her to the guards in the temple and find something more useful to do with your time."

Spirit nodded and did exactly that, setting an easy pace as he led them up through the bone galleries and into the profound blackness of a moonless night in Death City, which never saw brighter light than the shifting thick grey of dawn and dusk. Soul followed and watched Maka out of the corner of his eye - not, for once, because he was waiting for her to try something, but because he could _feel_ her mind going, processing every detail of every building and alley they passed, every stone of the road Soul had walked on the last morning that his mind had been solely his own. After the first few sideways glances she turned and gave him a very deliberate stare that made him jump; he kept his eyes studiously on Spirit's back or the road ahead for the remainder of the trip, but -

That image would haunt him: a woman clad in chains and prisoner's rags, stripped of her power and her status, defiant and waiting for her opportunity with an unwavering certainty that Soul, swallowing hard, realized he was in awe of. Kid wanted to flaunt her as a symbol of his power, of what Shinigami's will made manifest looked like; he wanted to grind her helplessness into her spirit until it broke. The more fool he. Soul stared at Spirit's broad shoulders and felt Maka _calculating_ , every muscle taut because _soon_ she'd be free, she'd be _out_ , and they'd all pay.

Soul blocked off the link - not that he'd really opened it up in the first place but the woman was insidious - and tried not to let on that she was making his stomach turn.

Spirit left them in a side room in the very temple that gave Temple Square its name, and Soul was forced to admit that it was rather impressive that it'd been cleaned up so fast after Maka laid waste to it with fire and rampant lightning strikes. That became a secondary concern, though, when Spirit gave them a meaningful look and a tap to Maka's shackles that left the metal brittle before leaving them with a pair of what remained of Kid's guard.

_"I can forgive physical weakness, because it is, at least in part, not something you can control," Maka had said, arms crossed despite the shackles, a thousand times stronger than him even at her most weary. "But you? Yours is a weakness of the spirit, and that's - deplorable. You're a willing victim, too craven to defend yourself from what you know are unjust accusations and too weak to do anything but take abuse and believe in your heart that you somehow deserve it. You could fight them, you could_ leave _, but instead you've let them corner you, and now you're_ my _problem."_

_"We're in this_ together _," he'd said without thinking, choking on a thousand ineffectual excuses, and her eyes had lit up like the searing flame she wielded._

The guards were dead within thirty seconds of the door clicking shut. Soul sighed, averted his eyes to a corner, and opened the link between them fractionally; the sound of shattering metal snapped his attention back to the woman he'd momentarily forgotten was called Scourge. Maka darted forward to knee the closest one in the groin and take his knife in one smooth motion, whirling first to stab his partner and then to finish him off in the same fashion: chin caught in the crook of her elbow and a knife in the back, carefully positioned.

"Hurts so much they can't scream if you hit the kidneys," she explained, and Soul did his best to suppress a surge of revulsion at such calculated violence. It was one thing to kill a man out of necessity, but to make a study of the most effective ways, to care so little -

"Would have been a lot easier for all of us if you'd give me the strength to be something more than a brute soldier," she added in response to his paling face, then fell silent when his eyes met hers, mouth thinning before allowing herself a sigh after a few tense seconds. "Let's go, at least."

Soul nodded, mechanical, staring at the growing pools of blood on the polished obsidian floor of one of Shinigami's most magnificent temples.

He could never return to Death City, would never see his drafty tower room again, might never have another chance to try to understand _why_ Wes had done what he'd done.

He'd wanted to know why, to hear it in Wes's own words, and he hadn't yet found the guts to ask.

_"I'll kill you if you hold me up," Maka had said when they were still caged together in her cell, and the blank void of her eyes had left no room for Soul to doubt. "You're already going to hobble me so that my only option is to run away instead of fighting, and I'll take my chances rather than let you get me killed if it comes to that. I hope for both our sakes that you can find the strength to stop being taken advantage of, Soul Eater. I hope you can learn to value your own life."_

He didn't hold her up, but he didn't really pay attention while she rummaged through one of the storage chests on the far wall, either. He boosted her through the room's narrow window when she indicated that she was ready to go, scrambled after, caught the heavy bag she tossed to him without comment, and ran after her into the black night with only a brief glance back at the sullen green glow of Kid's necromancy in Temple Square. They hit the city walls soon enough, and Maka didn't even have to ask for him to press his hands to the thick stone and concentrate; the barrier shifted and slid out of the way after a minute or so, leaving him with a pounding headache and the both of them with a clear escape path.

Maka glanced at him, standing next to the hole he'd created, and the twisted part of his mind took whatever was in her eyes for a threat; red began to creep into his aching head -

She grabbed his arm, eyes narrowing as her will snapped his mind back into proper pathways and she hissed, "We don't have _time_ for this - _run._ "

They ran. Soul couldn't decide whether she didn't look back to make sure he was still there because she didn't care or because the bond gave her more than enough indication of his proximity, but he pushed it to the back of his mind and followed her until they were far enough away from Shinigami's city that he was winded, far enough that the night felt restful instead of oppressive in its moonless shadow.

"I can get us away from here," Maka said when they stopped, not even breathing hard despite the restrictions on her energies. Perhaps it was because she'd given _Soul_ the heavy lifting. Still, she offered him her hand, a gesture he found strangely touching considering she could have just grabbed him and done whatever she wanted without permission or warning.

He took it, fingers slotting around hers and somehow surprised to find calluses there, more surprised that she didn't take the opportunity to crunch bones with her grip. Maka pulled a small object from her pocket, curled her fingers round it and did _some_ thing - and they were gone, flung through the forest at a speed so breakneck that Soul hardly expected to survive it.

/

He regained consciousness to a disconcerting mishmash of noise and sensation, realized he was flat on his face on the ground, took a hitching breath. Sticks and bracken were poking into him from every angle and moss was encroaching on his breathing - and somewhere nearby people were yelling. _Maka_ was yelling. Soul pushed himself up onto his elbows and lifted his head, blinking fuzzily at whatever was obstructing his vision until he realized what it was: Maka was standing in front of him, body humming with tension, what little power she could draw crackling around her in fitful bursts of lightning and heat. Somehow it'd gotten to be dawn, and the lost time was more unsettling than whatever bad situation he was in this time.

Soul dropped his head back down after a moment because he was still disoriented and if anything it hurt _worse_ than it had before; asked the universe, face pressed to the dirt, why _anyone_ would try to threaten the Scourge. Then he had to ask himself why whoever else was yelling was still alive, since Maka wasn't exactly the type to indulge in screaming matches when she could just obliterate obstacles.

" _Get up,_ " his protector snapped over her shoulder.

Soul got up before she decided to tax his control of the link more than she already was, not above using her shoulder as convenient - and annoying - leverage to help him find and keep his balance once he figured out that his knees weren't exactly steady and his stomach wasn't much better now that he wasn't horizontal any more. She gave him a brief flickering look of utter contempt for it, but she had better things to focus on, namely the two women staring them down from the porch of a mouldering cabin. Soul sniffed, wrinkling his nose at the smell of witch-magic, and blinked at the darker of the two, who was very clearly one of his own kind despite the fact that she was shoulder-to-shoulder with a shorter, improbably pink-haired girl who _reeked_ of magic and - fear?

"The fuck's going on," he slurred, trying to take in _anything_ about the situation that would make it make more sense. Whatever Maka had done had dropped them in a forest clearing that was presumably far from Death City, said clearing contained one very old and very run-down cabin, and it seemed that its apparent occupants were more than slightly aggrieved and ready to take on the Scourge - if they even knew whom, exactly, they were facing. Still, not much about that lined up into coherence. "Where _are_ we?"

"I don't know," Maka said, eyes never leaving the Weapon and - witch? - who were staring them down, still wary of engaging an unknown. "Far away from where we were, at least. That token should have taken us to a safe area, but Stein tampered with it and we ended up _here_ instead."

"Medusa didn't send you here?" the pink-haired girl asked, voice raised to make sure they could hear her, one hand on her companion's arm to hold her back.

Maka's expression hardened. "No," she said, and she and Soul both were watching as blackness crept up the darker girl's arms the same way that killing intent was creeping into her eyes. "I have no quarrel with you, though your Weapon seems to have one with me."

"It's nothing personal," the other girl said, stepping away from the her friend's grip before the spreading charcoal of her arms touched her. "But if you leave here alive, _someone_ will find out we're here, and that can't happen."

"Oh, fuck," Soul breathed, realizing, and got another sideways glance from Maka. She'd picked up on his skin-pricking unease, though, and tugged on the bond with more urgency; he let her have it, because he didn't want to die. "She's a firebrand," he elaborated when she kept looking at him. "They normally die as children because their power eats them up from the inside out - don't let her touch you."

Green eyes riveted themselves on the supposed enemy again. "I'm not afraid of _fire_ ," Maka said, and Soul had to remind himself that the urge to go for her throat for speaking to him like that came from madness and _her_ influence. He wasn't going to win a one-on-one fight with her, power games or no.

"If someone hit you with a branding iron you'd still _burn_ ," Soul snapped instead, because he _knew that now_.

"If she manages to lay a hand on me I deserve the brand," was her completely indifferent response, and Soul's grip on her shoulder faltered because _seriously_ \- but then electricity crawled over her skin and onto his in a disturbingly blissful rush, and at some point he might become accustomed to this new kind of madness but he wasn't holding his breath.

Taut silence stretched out for a minute, perhaps. "Don't you know that you shouldn't start fights you can't win?" Maka called, and Soul swallowed hard against an abrupt feeling of impending doom.

The other Weapon strode off the cabin's porch, eyes furious, arms black nearly to her shoulders, and right around the time spiderweb fissures opened along her forearms, exposing the molten light of a volcano's heart, the witch said, "Jackie, don't."

Soul took that opportunity to say, "I'm sure Stein sent us here for a reason, we probably shouldn't kill them."

Jackie didn't even look back when she said, "We can't let them go, Kim."

Maka's stare never wavered. "I'm not interested in being used by him any longer."

She wasn't interested in listening to Soul, either, if the state of the link between them was anything to go by. Soul looked at the witch - Kim? - and she shook her head, then suddenly brightened.

"What's in the bag?" she called, and Soul belatedly remembered the pack Maka had given him to carry, now discarded near where he'd fallen.

"What _is_ in the bag," he repeated, low, bending a little to put his mouth near Maka's ear.

"Nothing important," she said. "They can paw through it if they want. I doubt anything in there is going to make this - _firebrand_ \- change her mind about starting a fight. There's a war on, in case you managed to forget. I know _I_ wouldn't hesitate."

That wasn't true, but - "Might as well try," Soul said, and at last let go of her shoulder, happy to find that his legs were functional enough to allow him to collect the pack and toss it into the middle of the clearing.

That made the firebrand ease off a little; she at least stopped stalking towards them long enough for her companion to step off the porch so she could look through Maka's things.

"Armor," the girl said a moment later, looking puzzled and then a little wary as she looked more closely. " _Battle-mage_ armor." Her expression turned a little incredulous. "There's so much magic in this, I can't believe - _oh_."

She'd pulled Maka's body armor out of the bag, running her fingers across the jagged tear Soul had made, and then she'd turned it over and gone completely, unnervingly still.

"I see my reputation precedes me," Maka drawled, and her smile would have been amused if it hadn't also been so _terrifying._ Sometimes, Soul was learning, she lit up at the prospect of violence instead of treating it as an efficient means to an end, sparks in her eyes brighter than all the witch-souls he'd ever seen, teeth bared and fingers _itching_ for it, and he - hated it. Mostly.

"She can't be the _Scourge_ ," Jackie spat before Soul could think about it, and tore her eyes off Maka for long enough to take in whatever her companion was looking at. "The Scourge doesn't protect Weapons, Kim. She _kills_ them, remember?"

"Well, I seriously doubt anyone _else_ would be carting around this particular set of armor," Kim snapped back, then pulled something else from the bag - the scrap of chain Spirit had given Maka, that had made her go tight-lipped and silent when she'd looked at it. "Or - oh, by all the multitudinous gods, is this _Suzume's?_ "

"The _Reaper_ gave that to what's his name," Jackie said, staring at Maka again, this time with a lot less murderous intent and a lot more incredulous, dawning comprehension. "And if _she_ has it - "

"Is Spirit dead?" Kim asked, cutting Jackie off, green eyes hard and the soft lines of her face gone severe.

"Death Scythe is very much alive," Maka said, every word clipped, brittle, giving Soul an almost feral look when he started to explain that Spirit had given the collar to her that made him snap his mouth shut.

"Let us see your brand," Jackie said, and Soul felt Maka realize that she was referring to her battle-mage tattoo and throttle down a surge of violence.

"I'm not baring my neck for you or _anyone_ ," she said in a low, warning hiss that made the cracks in Jackie's arms spread and flare in alarm.

Kim put the armor and the chain back into the bag with some care and stood, brushing her legs clean as she did. "Before I was born," she said, with the air of someone choosing their words carefully, "my mother lived here alone. There's a Weapon village half a day away, and they would come to her when they were desperate for healing. Weapons have never been _fond_ of witches, but she wasn't Medusa's, so they let her stay. One day, a young Weapon officer brought a mostly-dead battle-mage to her. They blocked her link to Medusa and helped her, and that's how the Reaper met the father of her only child - for whatever reason, Medusa has not seen fit to breed her since. Some time later, another battle-mage came looking for her. My mother and Spirit let him take Suzume and her daughter back, because the baby had the same internal failing as all the pure-bred battle-mages - without a link to some external source of magic, she wouldn't live to see her first birthday." She gave Maka a meaningful look that made her look much older than she was. "And now here you are, bearing Suzume's old collar, and Death Scythe is not dead, so he must have given it to you."

"This must be a very confusing time for you," Jackie said, voice full of spite, then turned to Kim. "Now we _really_ can't let them leave, you know."

"Calm down," the young witch said, sighing. "She's here with a Weapon and we're not dead, so I have to assume that somehow she ended up linked to him and he's not letting her have her way. Pretty sure he would if you attacked them, though. How about," she continued, addressing Soul and Maka directly, "we have breakfast, give you two some directions, and none of us ever speak of this again to anyone?"

"Fine," Maka snarled, and at _last_ the electricity humming around her subsided as Jackie exhaled heavily and let her skin return to normal.

/

'Directions' ended up being nothing more than a single sentence, the recommendation that they follow the path away from the cabin and stay on it till they got to the nearby village. Jackie complained and Maka eyed it suspiciously, but Kim led them into the cabin - _not_ dilapidated inside in the least, a stark contrast that made Soul grimace, even more so when he felt the illusion that cloaked the outside creep across his skin when he passed through the door. The young witch settled them at a neatly set table complete with a cheerful plaid tablecloth and fixed them breakfast: a messy scramble of eggs, salt pork, and mushrooms that Soul wasted no time inhaling. He knew, because there wasn't a way for him _not_ to know, that Maka suspected the young witch of having tampered with the food somehow, but there was no smell of magic to it and, besides, no hint of artifice in Kim aside from the fact that she was obviously hiding any and all information about herself and her friend from them behind bright green eyes and a careful smile.

They didn't press for it because there wasn't really a reason to bother, and were headed down the overgrown path not two hours after Soul had awoken the ground - because, Maka informed him, they'd _been there_ for a few hours, him unconscious on the forest floor, before the sun came up and her presence was discovered.

"The vector arrows do take some getting used to," she said, setting a ground-eating pace that took advantage of the extra power he'd allowed her. "I'm not sure I've ever seen someone pass out, though. Usually it's just motion sickness."

Soul snorted and didn't argue, because he didn't want to hear her inevitable dismissal of extenuating circumstances as nothing but excuses. There were more important things than arguing with her, anyway.

"So," he said after a few more minutes of tramping through the brush, once the cabin was out of sight and out of earshot, " _now_ what are we doing?"

"Going to town," she responded, voice crisp. "And from there to the region's main holding, which is next to the Gate that will take us back to Medusa's tower. I need to know if what those girls at the cabin and Death Scythe have told me holds any truth. Getting into Medusa's records won't be a task to undertake lightly, so I need news before I can tell you what exactly we're going to be doing once we're in reach of the Gate. With any luck, I'll be able to meet up with my brothers instead of trying to do this alone."

Maka paused long enough to give him a distinctly uncompromising look over her shoulder. "Whatever you or Death Scythe might have _wanted_ me to do doesn't matter. Once I have the truth, I can make an informed decision about what, exactly, I am supposed to do with _you._ Until then, I'm going to tell anyone who asks that you're a traitor, my responsibility, and that if they dare question me I will personally remove their head from their body. I rank the entire army except the witches, and they won't even _think_ of investigating this on their own if I tell them that the information you and I have is for Medusa's ears only."

"You're going to just _bluff_ your way past who knows how many witches and an _entire army of battle mages_?" His voice might have cracked a bit, but Soul was past caring. "And then you plan on, what, just walking into Medusa's private library and reading her diary or something?"

She made a vaguely disgusted face at him, annoyed at the incredulity resonating down the link. "Not all of us are as useless as you've been your whole life," she snapped. "Yes, I am, and it's going to work because _I'm the fucking Scourge_. Your _only job_ is going to be to shut up and act like a craven traitor of a Weapon, which shouldn't be much of an act _at all_. If you want to live, and I assume you do considering the amount of effort you've put into staying among the living until now, I'm also going to need you to let me have my fucking power, because if they even _suspect_ that I've been weakened somehow this is all going to fall apart and you and I will be dead. Understood?"

His vision had gone red around the edges again, but this time it wasn't even his own madness triggering it - it was Maka's white-hot anger, her suspicion that she'd been lied to her entire life, and Soul glared at her in silence, their heartbeats clattering out of sync, until she nodded, said, "Good," and proceeded to ignore him for the remainder of the walk to town.


	8. When I get home, I want to feel less alone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really should have posted this some time ago, as I've been staring at it trying to convince myself that it was done and just needed edits for some time now. Regardless, enjoy -- and if you want to yell at me about it, I am in the SE Discord chat most of the time these days.

They reached the village sometime around noon, just as the little witch had told them. She hadn't lied about that and she hadn't poisoned them, and her story lined up with Spirit's - but dwelling on that wouldn't help anyone. Maka stopped Soul just before they reached the village proper, stepping away from the road and indicating that he should set the pack down at the base of a spreading tree.

"We can't go in looking like this," she explained when he gave her a now-what stare. He stared at her a lot, she'd noticed, but given their current situation that was hardly unexpected or uncalled-for. She'd been doing her share of the same, though she suspected it was for very different reasons. "I can't, anyway. Thankfully, Death Scythe decided to be useful and left us a few trinkets in addition to my armor."

She reached into the pack and pulled out a black and gold overcoat of heavy wool, tossed it to Soul and cracked the slightest smirk when he flailed to catch it. "This will keep anyone from asking questions or looking too close. See if it fits."

He'd probably never seen decent clothing before, given the way he looked at the thing. While the Weapon struggled with the coat, Maka pulled out a full set of clothing for herself, frowning at the gleaming cobra-head pins on the collar of the second, smaller coat and the halterneck undershirt that went with it. The rest was nothing special, just her armor and boots and a reasonably-fitted pair of trousers, but -

"What're those medals?" Soul interrupted, meandering closer, fussing with the coat's long sleeves and rolling his shoulders under its heavy cloth. It didn't fit _well_ , but it fit about as well as could be hoped for, considering. It would do the job, at least.

"An indication not to ask questions when I speak, which is a lesson I wouldn't mind _you_ learning," she said, standing and shaking out the coat. "That's a battle-mage's overcoat you're wearing. The pins are given to those of us who earn them. I have a matching pair. Stein had them." She paused, looked at the coat again. "My mother has them."

His unshaven face crinkled up a bit at her implication, white whiskers that had already been stark against the earth-tones of his skin made even more so by the dark wool he was wearing.

"Turn around so I can get out of these prisoner's rags," she said before he could do something foolish like try to be sympathetic, and to his credit he did so without protest, hands flitting across the coat's gold buttons while he waited.

The coat fit. That fact stole all her relief at finally having clean clothing again, another damning piece of evidence in Death Scythe's favor - because how else would he have clothes that fit her, how would he have gotten his hands on the cobra pins, how would he know to give her the halterneck shirt if he'd been lying? She'd been cast from her mother's mold, physically: small and fast, whipcord muscle over bone and very little in the way of traditionally feminine assets aside from what she was told was rather elegant bone structure. And the coat fit, nearly as well as the tailored one she'd left behind. At least the collar was high enough to cover her mangled mark and then some.

Maka snugged it round her neck, did up her buttons, took a deep breath of chill air - they were so close to the mountains, it never properly warmed here until the dead of summer - and came out from behind the tree to find herself being watched by one red eye, gleaming warily at her over a black-clad shoulder. She rolled her eyes and told herself that at least the Weapon was an effective distraction from how _angry_ she was at the events and implications of the past week.

"So what's the plan?" he asked, turning to face her when she didn't stop him, seemingly unsure of where to look as he took in her no doubt vastly improved appearance. Clad in that coat, even _he_ almost looked the part.

"I'm not about to let the local nobility know I'm here," she said, grimacing as she tried to comb her fingers through her snarled hair. "I can show them Stein's talisman from Medusa and they'll _pretend_ to honor it and not mention that they ever saw me, but that's not how it works with witches and their children. If I'm going to have any chance of bluffing my way back through the Gate and into the archives, the Mizune - the witch family that's in charge here - can't have any warning. If they do they'll contact Medusa, and that will be the end of that. So. We're going to go to the inn instead of following procedure, show the innkeeper the talisman, get food and a bath and hopefully horses, and keep moving."

"I'd _really_ prefer not to go anywhere near Ragnarok'sRagnarock's prison," Soul said, anxious hands on his buttons again, and she sighed.

"I know," she said, and she did, she really did; she hadn't been able to make sense of many of the memories she'd gotten from him, but she'd seen and learned enough to know that he was terrified of being anywhere near his mad forebear - and not just because of the possibility that Ragnarock's proximity might make his own madness more than an occasional problem. She also knew, now, that Ragnarock probably _was_ imprisoned under the tower, that the power source wasn't just a natural pooling of magic as Medusa had told them - that the Weapons weren't just hoarding natural resources that they didn't understand and couldn't use but had instead been guarding that place for a _reason_. It was knowledge that was making her life increasingly difficult the more she tried to consolidate it with what she'd thought she knew, because the more she tried the more she came up empty-handed.

"Still," she continued, closing up the pack and handing it to him as she headed back towards the road, "we don't have much choice. I can't leave you here, and I _have_ to get into those archives, so it's just a chance we're going to have to take. Between the two of us, I can't imagine that you'd be in very much danger of losing control. I'm much more concerned with figuring out all of the variables in play than I am with your mental stability."

"I'm not so cer - " he started, but her hand closed over his when he reached for the pack and her will snapped through him, leaving him standing there shaking as though he'd gone headfirst into cold water.

"I suppose you have a point," he said a few minutes later when he rejoined her on the road. He seemed to dwell on that for a little while, and then, as they reached the actual village proper, Maka began to realize that Soul Eater, despite supposedly having gained as much information from their link as she herself had, seemed to have picked up a distinctly annoying habit of asking her questions.

Questions like, "Are you going to tell your brothers about this?"

 _This_ being, obviously, more or less everything that had happened. It was interesting and potentially useful how the link between them, even shuttered as it was, added nuance and detail to simple statements, but Maka was already heartily sick of it - almost as sick of it as she was of the fact that the idiot Weapon wasn't intimidated enough by her to keep his mouth shut any more.

"Of course I am," she said, leading him down an alleyway that opened up behind the inn so she could knock on the kitchen door. As if she'd risk going into the common room and being recognized. "I wouldn't ask them to risk their lives for me without telling them everything."

She knocked; Soul was quiet for a moment, and then, when no one answered immediately, asked, "What if they don't like it?"

"You mean, what if they decide I'm the enemy now?" She hammered on the door, loud enough that a nearby dog started barking, and gave Soul a cutting look that she hoped would make him stop talking. "I'm prepared to deal with the situation should that come to pass, but I cannot in any lifetime see my brothers turning on me. It's not as though my concerns are _unreasonable_."

"You think they'd choose _you_ over Medusa," he replied, not a question this time, and she was startled to hear her own derision in his voice. Maka was about frustrated enough to see if kicking him in the ribs would make him shut up when the door opened and a very confused cook blinked down at her, effectively ending their so-called conversation.

"The innkeep, if you please," she said before the man could speak, tapping one of the golden snakes on her collar; he paled and disappeared with gratifying alacrity.

Except then the innkeeper appeared a moment later, his hands full of supplies that she knew were really just offerings - as to an angry god, perhaps - and Maka remembered just how tired she was. Somewhere she found the energy to act somewhat civilized about it, nodding and requesting an actual pack to hold it all; somehow she managed to endure his hasty recitation of every scrap of irrelevant news he could bring to mind. At least some small amount of it turned out to be helpful: her brothers were no longer at the front but rather most of the way back to the Gate themselves, having been injured in the effort to hold back the Thompson sisters. That almost got a chuckle out of her - they must have been ordered directly and with no small amount of authority to have left the battle lines, even injured, and she could only imagine Black Star's complaining.

" - afraid I don't have very much to offer you, Battle-mage, they ate nearly everything and I've got custom to think of - "

"What?" she said, sharp, and the man nearly swallowed his tongue before he started stammering on about how he supposed he could find something more to give her. "No, not that," she interrupted, suppressing a sigh. "They were _here?_ "

"Left this morning, late," was the confused response, and Maka was done being patient.

"Get us horses," she snapped, then: " _Available_ horses. I'll not have you taking someone's livelihood just because you want to curry favor, understand? While you're busy doing that, we'll avail ourselves of your bath. Don't dawdle."

He didn't, mercifully. "Obsequious little man," she muttered once he'd gone and they were climbing a narrow back staircase to get to the baths.

Soul Eater's bass rumble made her pause at the top of the stairs, glancing back over her shoulder to meet his sardonic carmine stare. "Far be it from me to point this out," he drawled, taller than she even standing a few steps down, "but you tend to speak to people as though you plan on killing them as soon as they stop being useful. You know that, right?"

"Medusa knows I'd _like_ to, a lot of the time," she responded automatically, perhaps slightly _taken aback_ , though whether it was at the aspersions the statement cast on what she'd always seen as normal behavior or the fact that Soul Eater had commented on it in the first place she wasn't completely certain. He made no response past a short snort, and she shrugged after a moment and continued down the hallway, hoping fervently that they were close enough to civilization for the inn to have a proper bathing area.

That, of course, came with its own strange price: Maka was still sighing in relief at the familiar facilities when Soul, still behind her, blurted, "What in Death's name - "

" _Quiet_ ," she hissed, because no battle-mage would _ever_ use a Weapon oath, might not even have a reason to _know_ one if they weren't ranked enough to have been taught the language, and his pointed teeth clicked together audibly when he snapped his mouth shut on whatever else he'd been going to say. "It is a _bathing room_ ," she continued in more measured tones after he'd stared at her in disgruntled silence for a moment and she'd had time to take a deep breath. "You sit by the taps and get clean, then soak in the tub after."

He kept staring at her, eyes flicking to the bathing supplies and the deep, heated tub at the far end of the room only briefly, and Maka nearly lost her composure and laughed at the intense mixture of confusion and embarrassment she was getting from him.

"There should be a separate room just like this next door," she said, tone carefully even. "If you want the privacy. Do I unnerve you so?"

He gaped at her. "It - _no,_ " he snapped, incredulous, fumbling, so incredibly incongruous when coupled with the sharp teeth, the fresh-blood eyes, the lurking tinge of madness. "It's just not _proper._ Besides, I thought you were in a hurry."

She managed not to smirk, somehow. "It's going to take a little time to get horses found and made ready for a trip. As I said, if this somehow offends your sense of propriety, use the facilities next door," she said, already unbuttoning her coat and moving to collect soap and a washcloth. "I'll expect you ready in half an hour. See that you don't act like a savage and get soap in the soaking tub."

He made a hasty exit before she took the coat off, and Maka found that she was glad for his strange, barbaric notions of propriety - if only because it meant he didn't get to see the full expanse of her rank tattoos, what he and the little witch from earlier had referred to as a brand. She had the distinct impression that he wouldn't appreciate the explanation behind them _at all,_ and it seemed that she was already so compromised that that fact actually _mattered_.

Annoyed - unaccustomed to residual feelings of what might actually be _guilt_ \- she scrubbed her skin nearly raw and heated the water in the tub practically to scalding with a little scrap of power before settling into it with a heavy sigh. Her brothers were going to have a _field day_ with the entire situation.

She soaked in the tub until some of the violent tension in her muscles eased, and when she emerged she found Soul Eater in the hallway, clean but apparently less relaxed than he had been when he left her last. Given that he'd been offered a tub of hot water to doze in, that must have taken some doing, regardless of how bizarre and dangerous their circumstances were. He'd taken up a post just outside the door, wary and on edge as though perhaps _guarding_ it, and Maka couldn't even bring herself to comment. The link between them made it pointless. Of course he had watched for her; she'd probably have done the same for him, just as an unconscious matter of course, the way one would guard anything essential.

It galled, that; not that Soul Eater _himself_ would be the one she found herself bound to, because the knowledge she had now meant that she knew him not to be a _completely_ undesirable partner, but that she had not _chosen_ him. It galled that they had been _forced_ to this. That he had been added to a list of mandatory things that included, among others, _air._ That something had been taken from her that she hadn't even known she possessed.

Given a choice and maybe an actual explanation - and, okay, very different life circumstances - she might have chosen him, might have been willing to bind herself to someone in such a fundamental way, but there had _been_ no choice, let alone useful information, and there was no reason to dwell in theoretical futures. More importantly, what determined whether or not they suited each other? Death Scythe seemed to feel as though it was some kind of mystic bond, but he was so _sentimental_ , so ruled by emotion where logic needed to prevail. If Stein could find someone capable of forming a bond with him, surely, _surely_ there was some rhyme or reason to it _;_ but no one seemed to know _anything._ Why was such a bond necessary, why did Soul Eater's presence ease a void in her chest she hadn't even been aware of until it vanished, what was _going on -_ and that was why she put a firm stop to those circuitous, burning questions, led Soul Eater back down the stairs, shooed the innkeeper away from the horses once she was certain they were properly equipped, and kept moving forward.

They didn't know, and she didn't know. Why could Weapons form a bond with battle-mages, but not with witches? The aching scars at the base of her neck forced her to acknowledge that her power had not, as she had always believed, been purely her own, but what did that _mean_ \- she set that thought aside for later with the others, got on her horse, and rode away from the village, pushing into a canter when Soul proved that he could ride well enough, somehow. She could have picked through the memories she'd gotten from him to find out the why of that, but since it didn't really matter she didn't bother; it was, she knew, in her best interests to preserve what distance between them she still could.

/

Maka found her brothers' camp as evening settled in, golden rays limning Kilik's dark skin where he'd settled himself on a log by the little creek they'd found. Soul actually jumped when she caught sight of her brother and leapt from the saddle, grinning wide; he'd been seemingly unprepared for such a jolt of relief and savage joy from her direction, and was still trying to dismount without getting tangled in his stirrups when Maka threw her arms around Kilik's neck.

"Careful," he said when she hit him, laughing as he draped one arm round her shoulders. "They didn't just send us home for fun, you know."

She'd known; she was careful. Kilik's left arm was bound against his side with a sling and heavy bandages, which was why she'd thrown her arms around his _neck_.

"Surprised you two managed to stay alive without me," she said with a twisting smirk, unaccountably relieved to be in the presence of her own kind once more, to feel the heat of her brother's magic on her skin.

"The Thompsons are a handful," Kilik allowed, lifting his good arm from her shoulders to scratch at the tight braids of his hair while he leaned back to eye Soul, the relaxed slouch of his shoulders deceptive as always. "And who's this? For that matter, where's Stein?"

Soul had moved away from the horses, but seemed to be at ends regarding his ultimate destination, since coming over to Maka would also involve getting very close to another battle-mage, one he had no reason to trust.

Maka could understand it; at least he had some semblance of a sense of self preservation, but putting himself in the open like that was a mistake. "It's complicated," Maka said, and allowed herself a resigned sigh when Black Star leapt out of the treetops immediately behind Soul, silent and wreathed in flame. "I'll explain in a moment."

Kilik gave her a deeply amused look, and though his tone was warm, his words were - less so. "I'd certainly _hope_ you'd explain why you've come back without Stein and escorting a Weapon in battle-mage's clothing, sister."

By the time he finished the sentence Soul had kenned to Star's presence and intent and dropped into a blurring roll, scythe blades erupting from the ground in his path and - Maka blinked at an unexpected twinge of her own magic - somehow unscathed by Black Star's trademark flame.

" _Maka,_ " Soul yelled, expression going from startled to murderous to unnerved when Star managed to dodge through his blades without even slowing down, cackling the whole time.

"Don't kill him," she called back, not bothering to address her statement to either of them in particular, and felt more than heard Kilik chuckle beside her. She also felt it when Soul loosened his grip on his power, a little bit of madness and flame spiraling through her blood so that she leaned forward without meaning to, watching with a crooked grin as Star abandoned magic as probably useless and switched over to the pair of short blades he kept at the small of his back. They sparked off Soul's shifted hands as the two collided in a whirling flurry of sharp edges and mad laughter, and a moment later Soul, slipping back into Maka's instinctive prowess with her bare hands, managed to throw Black Star clear across the campsite. Maka watched her brother go flying past, bemused, and stood while Star was still finding his footing on the rocks at the edge of the creek. Soul was still baring sharp teeth when Maka intercepted Star on the rebound, feet digging short furrows in the earth when he collided with her outstretched arm.

"Cute pet y'got there," he said, flame licking over his skin still, eyes never leaving Soul. "You trade Stein for 'im? Can't say I blame you too much." He glanced her way so briefly it might have been a hallucination, but for that flicker of a grin that came with it. "Got stronger, little sister. You gonna tell us why we shouldn't kill this guy?"

" _You_ shouldn't kill him because you have a _head wound_ , which I would thank you not to aggravate further because I don't want to have to _carry you home,_ " Kilik snapped, and Soul eased out of his combat stance when Black Star threw his head back and started laughing - though his weight canted to the side, too, so that he was leaning half on Maka. The bandages wound round his head weren't just for show, then.

"Sit down," she said, trying not to get a mouthful of her chortling brother's hair, and knew that he was running at least half on pure bravado when he complied with only minimal posturing in Soul's direction.

"Good job," Kilik said, acerbic, as Black Star took a seat beside him; they both watched as Maka considered her situation and paced over to Soul, putting a judicious hand on his shoulder with more care than he seemed to expect. "Anyway, if Maka says she has an explanation for consorting with the enemy, then I'm sure she has an explanation for consorting with the enemy. _Especially_ the part where he's not in cuffs and is dressed like one of us instead of the miserable traitor he supposedly is."

Soul was - not vibrating with tension, as the saying went, but _taut_ , the wool of his coat singed and his nerves not much better. Maka turned to face her brothers with a sigh. "Of course I have an explanation," she said, voice as reasonable as she could make it. "It's rather ridiculous, and I wouldn't believe it myself if it wasn't my current reality, but it _is_ an explanation." She sighed again, malcontent with her options if this went poorly, and continued. "You're at liberty not to believe me, of course, but I can't say I'd lay good odds on your chances in a fight with me if you take it amiss."

Kilik's eyebrows went up and Black Star indulged in a ripping snort of amusement. "I said y'got stronger, Maka, but that's takin' it a bit far, ya think?"

She shrugged, glanced at Soul, who met her eyes and grimaced, hands at last shifting back to normal as his nerves steadied a bit. "Trust me on this," she said, then took a deep breath and began her explanation with, "Stein is a traitor."

 


End file.
